The Old School Otaku Lounge

Was SonMay out of Taiwan or mainland China? I still have lots of bootleg publishings of St. Seiya manga in Chinese that look like they were mimeographed with the Chinese put in over whited out Japanese. A weird curio of the old days...

According to this article, Son May Records is/was from Taiwan. I own two SM soundtracks: A LOGH "Overature to a New War" and a KOR "Special BGM." The former I had actually bought (At the '09 San Diego Comic Con, IIRC) and the latter was given to me by my friend (Ganalef on here, who unfortunately works 28 hours a day or something ridiculous these days and cannot be a part of this forum anymore).

SM's earlier efforts were fairly lackluster, with merely black and white scans of the booklets' insides. Eventually they made fairly nice replicas, I suppose. Strangely enough, for both of the ones I own, the obi/spine card doesn't quite fit inside the booklet and must be put inside lengthwise to be preserved.

Sonmay CDs, I still have a few of them lying around from the 90s before I knew any better, like Magic School Lunar and World Masterpiece Theater. The only one I ever bought on purpose was the TO-Y soundtrack, for a buck plus shipping off ebay. From what I could find the soundtrack was available on LP only (has that changed recently? If so I'll buy it legit) and I needed those songs.

My local mall used to have a big-time anime bootlegger in the early 2000s. He has DVDs of Ghibli titles (three per disk), Sonmay cds, bootleg boxsets of things like Flame of Recca, t-shirts, model kits, you name it. Guess they finally nabbed him.

Got a bunch of the SM TV Animation Best Collections, Polling Rank of Japan Animation (Theme Songs), DBZ "We Gotta Power" music collection. This with my other, mostly game music from Japan collections. Haven't listened to them in years. Might be time to do so again...

And here's that column! Thanks Usamimi!

Awesome! And no problem, glad to help

The reply was right on though...cribbing is still going on but has been on going since art became "art". Went back and checked out some early issues of Dr. strange back when Ditko was doing them in the 1960s. Darn if Baron Mordo isn't a direct rip of the character of Pendragon that Torin Thatcher played in "Jack the Giant Killer" in 1962! And they are still "paying homage" to that Superman cover with him smashing the car from the 1940s. I've seen that cover with a ton of other characters over the years. Nothing new having people rip things though as I used to see both Japanese and Chinese knockoffs for profit by every industry including the automotive industry back in the day. That used to be the worst for outright intellectual theft and industrial espionage by companies that even for the time should have known better. Makes anime and manga theft seem tame by comparison...

I went to art school; I'm familiar with the concept of plagiarism. I don't really think what Hook-Ups qualifies as 'art theft', though. Calling it such would imply a level of artistic or thematic intent that simply isn't present in this case. This is two or three levels lazier than plagiarism.

Nice, fun thread and fun article! Good job guys!

Resurrecting this because I found some NEW "borrowed" art on Hook-ups' CURRENT PRODUCTS!

We have this new poster/deck/shirt design:


That I thought looked a lot like Satoshi Urushihara's work...Plugged his name into Google Image Search and, sure enough:


We also have this new poster/deck/shirt design:


That's obviously another Urushihara piece, this time off the cover of one of his artbooks:


There's a couple of new shirt designs they have that look vaguely familiar, I think another is also a blatant recolored Urushihara piece, the others I'll have to look at when I'm not so sleepy.