about those Amateur Press Associations

The roughly mid-90's and earlier (generally pre-Toonami, pre-anime boom) era of anime & manga fandom: early cons, clubs, tape trading, Nth Generation VHS fansubs, old magazines & fanzines, fandubs, ancient merchandise, rec.arts.anime, and more!
davemerrill
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Re: about those Amateur Press Associations

Post by davemerrill »

APAs are a lot of work. Nobody wanted to take over Animanga when I finally pulled the plug. Zine publishing is work, but at the end of the day a zine editor can find something to print by himself, but an APA depends entirely on a bunch of people all finding something to print, finishing it by a deadline, and then sending it to the OE, who thenhas to collate it all and put it all in envelopes and take it all down to the post office. The last few Animangas were really thin, people simply were not participating.

I always admired Tim and Paul's hand lettered tribs, and my goal at one point was to hand letter my tribs to force my lettering to get better. It didn't work. My usual technique was to print all the copy out into columns and then scissor those into blocks, and combine text blocks with images in two columns onto 8.5 x 11 copy paper, glue it all down, and take it to Kinkos or Office Depot (Office Depot was cheaper, I think). I spent a lot of time jamming copiers in that Office Depot.

There was talk in the late 90s of finding a digital replacement for APAs. Wakefield at one point wanted to just send a floppy disc around - he'd post his trib as a file on the floppy, mail it to me, I'd post MY trib on the floppy, mail it to the next guy, etc. I know one local Toronto SF fan (who was an Animanga member for maybe two issues) who has a zine/APA that has basically turned into a PDF file he sends to members or subscribers.
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Re: about those Amateur Press Associations

Post by SteveH »

I think what Derek wanted was a digital 'Round Robin', a different sort of mail participation fanac (Fan Activity).

But reminded of that, I do wonder how much of our fannish...spirit? Culture? Outlook? is keyed to the days of external limitations. Consider what we all know, and have discussed in the past:

To be a fan you had to find contact. SOMEONE had to have something. A tape, a book, a model, a toy, a record...something. Even if you kicked over because of a catalyst anime seen on local TV, SOME point of contact had to trip you to the larger floating world that is anime fandom.

Once there, once entered into the culture, one had to deal with poor quality copies of shows, untranslated, often unable to see an entire run of a show. Hunting for better everything was the norm. One could become obsessed with a show just from seeing the opening credits. The Hunt became paramount.

Communication was key. Finding people, making friends. Reaching out to strangers hoping for that score.


Things shifted. Local Kidvid vanished, Toonami became dominate, the internet sped communication and information and DISinformation. The old tried and true retailers of cool stuff (Pony Toy, Melody Records and Books Nippan) died or became otherwise ineffectual and the reign of the Hong Kong/Taiwan bootlegs arose, to be mostly pushed back by the rise of internet retailing such as Hobbylink Japan, CD Japan, Amazon Japan.

Meanwhile anime became easy. At least if you had an interest in some specific sub-types or current product. Self-destructing VHS tape was replaced by mostly indestructible DVD and chains of retailers carried product from coast to coast of the US of A. A golden age, unless you loved shows from the '70s and '80s.

But for all that, for all the instant communication of the internet, something got lost. People still engaged in the hunt but now, it was easy. With a bit of skill and proper software people could grab just GOBS of anime, download it to their computer, power binge watch. And it didn't really mean anything. It was just a thing to do. It wasn't a Holy Quest. It wasn't a trail of horror and sacrifice and effort. It was click click a few hours and done. Empty. Hollow. Shallow.

WE, now, are the 'depression generation'. We are the old ones who fought and sacrificed and lost it all for our love of cartoons in a language we can't understand.

Where was I going with this? I forgot. :)
davemerrill
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Re: about those Amateur Press Associations

Post by davemerrill »

My experience with Animanga APA changed from being an anime fan talking about anime with other anime fans, to being a cartoonist talking about cartooning with other cartoonists, and the back and forth communication in that regard didn't change, it was always helpful. It's the closest I've gotten to the art school "critique" experience, where you put your work up and the class tells you what works and what doesn't. I know that today artists put their work online and get critiques, but the APA environment, like the art school environment, is a closed session where everybody's going to be expected to put their work up at some point, everybody's got some skin in the game. I don't see this happening in a lot of online spaces.

Japanese animation is a mass market entertainment medium, but I think the early days of anime fandom in the West missed that point entirely, because for us, it wasn't. It was something we had to claw out of the wilderness. We had to translate it and champion it and advertise it and promote it and distribute it. I don't regret doing that work, but I am glad that it's over. I'm glad that this mass media can actually be mass media, that a TV show can be watched like a TV show and not quested after like a holy relic.

People are still making connections through their shared love of Japanese cartoons, it happens all the time. It's just that now we don't have to deal with mailing VHS tapes or making 25 copies of our APA tribs down at Kinko's, and we don't have to talk a comic-con events director into letting us show cartoons for a few hours in their video room. We've been freed from a lot of the obligations of the past, and I find that liberating.

Not depressed at all to bid farewell to, let's keep this on topic, the APA that the C/FO ran strictly for its officers so that all its officers could keep track of what was happening where and whether or not it broke any of the C/FO's bylaws. I don't miss that nonsense at all.
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Drew_Sutton
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Re: about those Amateur Press Associations

Post by Drew_Sutton »

Dave and Steve - thanks for all of the background info on the APA scene and what went into them. Really informative, including re-reading the Let's Anime article. I guess I'd missed or forgotten that they were a members-only affair. But I do remember thinking that I'd wished that I'd been in on it; it does sound like fun, even today.
davemerrill wrote: This is one of those situations where I have to keep reminding myself that these APAs were private and that the crazy, lurid cheesecake fanart posted in those APAs by a future sex offender wasn't meant for general distribution, and that as much as I would love to post this stuff on Twitter or Tumblr and mock it, well, I'm not going to do that.

Similarly, there are people whose political, religious, and ethical positions changed radically over the years, and as tempting as it was to dig up their left-wing rants from two decades back to embarrass their current right-wing selves, the bottom line is that those were privileged communications. Making that material public is not my call to make.

There are other people in those APAs who have since changed their names, who have since changed their genders (Animanga was ahead of the curve on that one!) and who otherwise have been through a lot of life changes, both good and bad, since then. Digging up their 1990 selves for the world to gawk at, well, that's tacky.
So, I had wondered why your position about scanning and posting APAs was what it was but this makes a lot of sense. APAs were more personal by design, so tribs could have a lot more personal bends to them than just how you felt about a particular cartoon at one time or another. I could see defending an opinion on a piece of media changing over such a time but I completely understand the position that tribs could and would go beyond that.
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_D_
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Re: about those Amateur Press Associations

Post by _D_ »

As I pass by this big stack of Anime Janai every morning to get to the computer room in my house it reminds me of just how much work Marg Baskin and co. had to do to get each issue out...
runesaint
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Re: about those Amateur Press Associations

Post by runesaint »

davemerrill wrote: Tue Dec 05, 2017 12:54 pm
Just like with the later internet, you never REALLY knew if the person writing that APA trib was exactly as he or she was presenting him or herself. There were a few Animanga members whose tribs kind of blurred the line between reality and self-insert fan fiction, and to this day I do not know if they were executing a long-term tall-tale prank, if they actually believed the outlandish stories they were telling about themselves, or if it actually was all true. I'll probably never know.
In case you were ever curious, it actually is true that a Film History class showed both the reviews of The Worst Movie Ever Made (Armageddon: The Final Challenge) and They Took the Word 'Gullible' Out of the Dictionary (Alien Abduction-Incident in Lake County). It is also true that the students found both of them interesting. The latter was shown so that they would be more critical of documentaries and the former ... no idea why the former one was shown. Possibly about there being no "ultimate bad movie".
-R
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mbanu
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Re: about those Amateur Press Associations

Post by mbanu »

Reviewing old threads, I realized I never apologized for posting old scans with all the info intact. I think this might be an otaku generational gap thing. By my (the middle-schooler) generation, the idea that someone might graduate from high school or college, find a house, and still be living there 20 years later just wasn't on the radar, because the idea of owning a house fresh out of college wasn't on the radar, and with rent, well, rent always seems to go up. So an official apology -- I'm sorry about that.

I do hope more old-school fans take this time to come out of the woodwork, though -- a lot of younger fans don't have a clear idea of what an otaku looks like after college, and I think this produces a lot of anxiety, even for folks of my generation of otaku, who have been out for a while and are the current model for what a post-grad otaku looks like, because the future seems so hazy unless you know about the C/FO and the various paths the old-schoolers took between then and now.
mbanu: What's between Old School and New School?
runesaint: Hmmm. "Middle School", perhaps?
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Re: about those Amateur Press Associations

Post by _D_ »

Ah well, to many of the Youtube generation, we are just old foggies. Still. I tried to interest some people who were looking for old or "lost" material recently but was ignored. It doesn't help that I was willing to give them examples of stuff that no one had on Youtube. Result? Dead silence. They are in their own little world. Oh well, plenty of others who ARE interested, just not on Youtube...
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