On My Shelves: Chrono Trigger

       When my wife and I were married in 1995, one of our wedding gifts – partly as a joke – was a Super Nintendo gaming system. There were a few games we occasionally played but it was more an in-joke for the group than anything else.        At that time we were also heavily into Dragonball/DBZ fandom, with my wife specifically a fan of Akira Toriyama's art. So when, some months later, we heard about a new video game, a so-called "RPG", that Toriyama had done the design work on, we decided to get it, mostly for the neat character [ Continue reading... ]

Under the Influence: Saint Seiya

     Back in the primitive days before the World Wide Web, before E-mail was standard and cellphones common, there was also the time in which anime and manga (Japanese animation and their equivalent of comics/comic books) were as fringe an interest as science fiction itself was many years before. It was an American fandom consisting of small groups of true fans, fanatics in many ways, with connections as secretive and torturous as those of drug smugglers to get second or third generation VHS tapes of these peculiar and exotic animated shows – [ Continue reading... ]

On My Shelves: Metal Fighter Miku

  There are shows and books you can describe in a capsule form and the coolness of the idea is immediately apparent: "Test pilot crashes and is rebuilt with super-cybernetics for a top-secret agency", "Valley Girl discovers she's destined to be The Slayer, mystical warrior against vampires and other demonic forces", "Ancient Egyptian artifact turns out to be an alien gateway".   Then there are those in which the capsule form ranges from the stupid to the "what drugs are you ON?". For example, "In the future, the most popular sport [ Continue reading... ]