Misato's Fan Service Center: Book 7, Issue 3

Misato's Fan Service Center

c/o Viz Comics P.O. Box 77010 San Francisco, CA 94107

misato@viz.com

Like my man John Sebastian would say, welcome back, welcome back, welcome back. And here's the last of the back-logged letters from Book Six—from the country that gave the world my name and Stig Helmer! "Danish scum!"

Dear Carl,

I've to begin with a confession! First of all, I'm a big Sci-Fi Fan and authors into that subject. I ain't big, but I admire authors as Keith Roberts (Pavane), Harry Harrison (as in The Stainless Steel Rat series) and A.E. van Vogt (as in The Weapon Shops of Isher). It was via a side branch I tumbled into anime and manga beginning in the nineties. I read a long novel called Japan Sinks (No, I don't recall the author's name!) and tried to find out what kind of Sci-Fi Comics Japan made. It wasn't Akira nor Ghost in The Shell. [In anime] it was Macross and Macross II! In comics, Yuzo Takada's 3X3 Eyes!

But it was Haruko Takachiro's (original) Dirty Pair, by Dokite'a chara-design, I fell in love with. I have the three Dirty Pair OAVs, as Streamline released for ahile and the five OAVs by (Original) Dirty Pair, as RAI Televizione released (These are in Japanese with Englsih sub-titles, by the way! I prefer to listen to the original language!) I hope that all these twenty-six TV episodes, aired '85-'86, may soon get on DVDs.

But I was damn impressed over Neon Genesis Evangelion; only Patlabor 2 and Ghost in the Shell is equal to NGE. I really enjoy both films as politically motivated movies. Like Doctor Strangelove, Apocalypse Now or M.A.S.H. When it's possible in animation, it gets incredible! Anyhow, is NGE more political then ecclesiastical? From that point of the view, I really enjoyed the OAVs!

But the problem with both anime and manga, as I see it, either these directors or authors, have a difficult time closing their stories. (Ranma 1/2, even Inu-Yasha, just keep going round a treadmill!) Or to give their stories a end, who may feel as a end of reliable. In that way I wasn't pleased over the end by OAVs of NGE. NGE is only one example of many! Another example are Animeworks' Ninja Cadets! It starts so good, just to feel like a old, traditional cliff-hanger into it's end!

That why I understand that Kenichi Sonoda finished his work of Gunsmith Cats, with a end who I could find suitable, after all! It could get much better made, by the way. Can you explain why a author of Japanese anime or comic writer/artist in Japan have these problems?

If you can...do tell, please!

Fam. Britt-Marie &
Anders G Magnusson
Speldosegatan 8
S-421 46 V. Frolunda - Sweden

Sakyo Komatsu (he was also a manga artist in the early 1950s, under the pen name Mori Minoru) wrote Japan Sinks. If memory serves me correctly, he also wrot the story "At The End Of The Endless Stream," for which Gainax named the final episode of their 1988-89 OAV series Gunbuster—itself a classic of Japanese science fiction. Since alternate history is my favorite genre of SF (I urge everyone to check out the Kodansha Bilingual Comics edition of Kaiji Kawaguchi's new alternate-WWII manga, Zipang) I definitely like Pavane. And as a Lupin III fan I naturally dug The Stainless Steel Rat (although I have also read almost everything Harry Harrison wrote prior to the mid-80s or so. Did you know Harrison was also once a comics artist, and wrote a SF story about a comics-drawing robot making human artists obsolete?) I have never read van Vogt, but have wanted to.

Yeah,