Buckle up, Steve's here!

[SteveH]

Or something to that effect.

Hey. Dave spilled the beans about this place, and it looks like something I'm going to feel pretty comfortable with.

Been a fan since either 1979 or 1982, depending on how one counts such things. I got sucked in by Star Blazers but it wasn't until '82 that I actually started buying books and magazines and toys and models and actually knowing something about what exactly I was buying.

Not sure I should count the time from 1980 to '81 when I was going insane buying Space Battleship Yamato LPs. I was grabbing everything I could find, didn't know jack squat about what it was all about.

Got my fannish start in a local Star Trek club which, in a startling short time I became president of, then led the group in creating our own media convention called Babelcon (1979-1988), helped with the club fanzine, was editor/publisher of the club newsletter for a brief time and otherwise just did the local fan thing.

Then I became insane, and after a long, like all night long conversation with Ardith Carlton (she got locked out of the room she was sharing, so I stayed up so she wouldn't be bored and lonely and that sort of thing) I came up with the idea of producing a fanzine in the spirit of the 'Roman Album' produced by Tokuma Shoten. With the hard work and help of Ardith and my best friend Jerry Fellows I managed to crank out Space Fanzine Yamato, which much to my surprise seems to have some cache with some folks. Dave has a really decent post about it on his Let's Anime blog.

When the anime bug bit me, the club for the most part turned its back. Didn't matter, I embarked on that 'anime evangelism' phase most fans feel the need to do and with my growing collection of tapes started traveling to various Michigan sci-fi conventions to show the stuff.

Contacted by Derek Wakefield for help in organizing the Texas-based EDC, I tried to steer him away from the whole 'chain of command' system but, I guess, just empowered him more with answering questions and building tables of organization and so on. But being connected with the EDC was useful as among those I met were Dave and Bruce Lewis and Ed Hill and others.

I hit a wall in the late '80s, feeling that the only anime worth watching was old shows, and I did go and re-discover series I had passed by or unfairly maligned. Then at a Project: A-Kon they whipped out the first teaser trailer for Giant Robo: the Day the Earth Stood Still and wham! I was right back into it.

Nowadays, I'm just the guy that ticks off Mike Toole and gets namechecked by Daryl Surat when he wants a shorthand for a type of fannish mentality. I can't help it that I foresaw the death of American Anime caused by the bankruptcy of Suncoast. Nobody believed me about how big a problem it was going to be, but I was right.

I'm not really watching much nowadays. The MOE invasion pretty much leaves me cold, nobody seems to be interested in making anime that isn't filled with disturbing fetish imagery. It seems there's maybe 1 show a year that even gets my attention. And then came Yamato 2199.

Yay. it's 1979 all over again.

[greg]

The MOE invasion pretty much leaves me cold, nobody seems to be interested in making anime that isn't filled with disturbing fetish imagery.

I certainly agree with you! Welcome to the forum! Yamato is essentially anime's answer to Star Trek, so I can imagine fandom overlapping between the two shows.

[usamimi]

Welcome, welcome! Always great to have new members!

Ah, do you still go to Project A-kon? I've been going ever since I moved down to Texas a few years ago, it's a good con.

[SteveH]

Welcome, welcome! Always great to have new members!

Ah, do you still go to Project A-kon? I've been going ever since I moved down to Texas a few years ago, it's a good con.

Thank you!

No, cons are a bit out of my reach anymore, that ol' debbil money and stuff.

Meri is a cool person, she up and decided to have me as a 'fan guest' for a few years and that was pretty swank. It was at A-Kon that I actually met Dave Merrill et. al.

I have found over the years that what makes a con good or bad is what one makes of it. I have been to cons where I barely DID anything with the con proper, spending most of my time with friends, going places and seeing things. The con was basically an excuse to visit another city.

In a perfect world I'd be comfortable hitting A-Kon again. I kinda sorta have adopted Anime Weekend Atlanta as my preferred 'home' con, and my heart still wants to get back to Anime Central in Chicago (even tho the city is quickly rushing to become Detroit... ). Oh, and that Anime North thing I keep hearing about. That could be fun.

[SteveH]

The MOE invasion pretty much leaves me cold, nobody seems to be interested in making anime that isn't filled with disturbing fetish imagery.

I certainly agree with you! Welcome to the forum! Yamato is essentially anime's answer to Star Trek, so I can imagine fandom overlapping between the two shows.

Thank you! Of course one of the disturbing things about Yamato 2199 was the inclusion of mucho MOE stereotypes, and I was really really afraid for it. Luckily the MOE is kept at bay for the most part.

[davemerrill]

Hey Steve!!

Listen, getting namechecked by Surat is a good thing. Like Oscar Wilde says, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

[SteveH]

Hey Steve!!

Listen, getting namechecked by Surat is a good thing. Like Oscar Wilde says, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

Which I guess means I've fallen out of favor as Daryl and Patrick Macias no longer make mocking reference of me and my ranting.

No, Daryl's a good guy. I gave him a book on Mexican Wrestlers when I saw him at AWA in '11 and I think he was frightened and confused that I would do such a thing. I can't help it, I like to share when I have the ability.

[davemerrill]

I will tell everybody my first meeting with Steve: when I was in the EDC getting into organized anime fandom, you'd read what others were writing about Yamato, and Steve's SPACE FANZINE YAMATO was referenced early and often as a seminal work in the fandom, which it was. At the time I was sending in terrible fan art to the EDC's zine "Nova" and had a really embarrassingly bad jokey comic in the fan art/comics supplement to "Nova," which was called "Wildstar", I believe.

One night the whole gang was in my parent's rec room and we were watching TV and eating pizza and we were going to play the Illuminati card game, and then the phone rang, and it was Steve, whom I had never spoken to before, but who had dug my phone number out of a membership list somewhere and felt like giving me a call to tell me how much he was enjoying my (really terrible, seriously) comic in the EDC zine. I think we talked for three hours about darn near everything, and I never did play Illuminati, which is, as it turns out, a good thing, kind of a bullet I dodged there. All thanks to Steve. Thanks Steve, for saving me from an interminable card game and saying nice things about my comics.

Steve later sent me a VHS copy of the first episode of "Giant Robo", which, as it did him, totally renewed my interest in the anime medium. It also made me fail Japanese in college as it arrived the night before a crucial exam and important study time was taken up by me watching "Giant Robo" (no complaints, I totally deserved to fail that class).

Actually Steve has sent me (and others) a bunch of neat stuff over the years, including an in-depth article all about Space Fanzine Yamato, which I was pleased to run at Let's Anime. There's many of us who owe Steve thanks.

[SteveH]

Aw, shucks, Dave. Insert 'digging toe in dirt and blushing and shuffling' here. I didn't mean to screw up your game, man. Who knows, Illuminati may have put you on the path to become a wizard at Magic: the Gathering just a few years later! You may have dumped that stupid anny-may junk for the high profile world of the Collectable Card Game!!

Giant Robo was, and is, 17 different kinds of awesome. I was so fired up by it I was importing the Japanese LDs just as fast as they came out.

The nearest excitement compared to that would have been when Shin Mazinger hit. Jerry snapped up the first of the Japanese Blu-Ray sets and we both found it quite acceptable, but continuing money problems kept him from finishing the set, and then he died. It's not fair, him not getting to see Yamato 2199.

Yeah, that's right. No subtitles, no translations, no guides. My level of Japanese? Babies can speak, read and understand more than I do even after all these years. Well, maybe not THAT severe but close. Whenever possible I buy the Original Japanese stuff because I can't be bothered to wait around for some American company to figure out anime other than MOE lolicon harem shows can sell.

[Daniel]

Hey Steve! Welcome aboard! So glad to have you...!