FSC: BIG-100 SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO MOOK & PERFECT MEMORY BE FOREVER YAMAO

So now we come to a momentary diversion, as a new monofocus cropped up that took some of my attention and a lot of my funds away from comic book collecting. Since relocating to Delaware with my family, I had started watching STAR BLAZERS, this science fiction cartoon that aired on WTAF Channel 29 at 3:30 every afternoon. And it’s fair to say that I became obsessed with it. It had a serialized structure, which made it imperative to follow every episode–once the show had cycled back around to the beginning of its 52 episode run, I started making an index as to the contents of the different episodes so that I could work out how many there were and what they contained. For those who are unfamiliar with the series, I wrote about it a long time ago here:

STAR BLAZERS

The end credits of the series indicated that it was based on a Japanese program, but that’s about all that I had to go on in terms of finding out more about this series. This was decades before the Internet, and Anime wasn’t even yet a word that anybody knew. (As fans began to congregate around the show and others like it, we for many years referred to it as “Japanimation”). I didn’t so much as possess a video recorder at this point, so I couldn’t yet keep copies of the show, though I was desperate to know everything there was to know about it.

I had thought that I remembered that it was in the pages of EPIC ILLUSTRATED that I came across a notice for a dealer who was selling books based on Japanese series, but in researching this piece, I couldn’t locate any such a mention. So I have no idea where my first contact with the nascent fan base truly started. All I can tell you is that I came across such a notice somewhere and wrote to the guys, and he kindly sent me back both a hand-written list of assorted volumes that he had in stock for sale (the descriptions for which were quizzical. I had no idea what a “Roman Album” was yet.) He also let me know that there was a Star Blazers Fan Club that was being run out of New York and passed me their contact details, which put me in contact with Mike Pinto and Brian Cirulnick, who helped to usher me into that growing fandom. The key thing, though, was the books this dealer had on offer. They were pricey, at least as compared to comics, and I had no idea what they contained. But I was hooked, so I rolled the dice and ordered two: the “BIG-100 SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO MOOK” cost me $11.00, whereas the “PERFECT MEMORY (MEMOIR) BE FOREVER YAMATO” volume was a mere $6.00–which is the main reason that I ordered it, it was the cheapest Yamato volume he had in stock.

The books were both odd sizes, smaller than a paperback book but a lot thicker. The BIG-100 volume was the approximate dimensions of a Big Little Book, and the Perfect Memory was taller and slimmer. These volumes were examples of an expansive merchandising system that existed among Anime in Japan. They were in Japanese, of course, which limited my ability to glean information from them. But they were also lavishly illustrated, both in color and black and white, and they contained a bevy of behind-the-scenes drawings and designs and story concepts–everything a fan might want to know about the making of these two projects.

I didn’t yet know that BE FOREVER, YAMATO was a feature film, so the fact that this book divided the plot up into ten segments made me think for a time that it was a short-run television series similar to the ones that I had previously seen. The SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO volume confirmed that this was the first half of what had been made into STAR BLAZERS, and it gave me a few tantalizing glimpses of moments that had been excised from the American broadcasts. I thereafter embarked on a quest to be able to see these stories uncut in their original form (something that’s a hell of a lot easier to accomplish in 2026.)

From this point on, while I never left comics behind, my focus over the next couple of years was on Anime. My father eventually broke down and bought the family a big, bulky Betamax recorder, which enabled me to begin purchasing and trading for episodes of a variety of series recorded from Japan. A Philadelphia fan named Bill Smith was my first main hook-up in this regard; he would fill up a blank video tape with requested content for $20.00 or later $25.00. So this is where my money was going, as I watched series such as MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM, SUPER DIMENSION FORTRESS MACROSS, SPACE COBRA and LUPIN III almost in real time as they were being broadcast in the early 1980s. Which also meant that a good deal of my funds were being diverted to that cause and away from comics.