As everybody knows Amiami is now accepting orders from international customers. I order most of my stuff from Hobby Search and HLJ, and seeing as how Amiami’s prices are quite a bit lower than either of those two stores, I was curious as to how good they are. I planned to order MegaHouse’s Aldra since she was on sale, but seeing as how they had one Kotonoha figure left, I tossed her in the shopping cart as well.
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Once when I was a kid living in Seoul, my uncle took my brother and I to a comic book shop near downtown, just a bit west of Gate 1 to Yongsan base. I doubt it’s still there, and I have no idea how my uncle even knew about this shop in that pre-Google Maps era. I was bewildered that such a shop even existed; I didn’t think that Koreans had much interest in American comics (despite being ethnically half-Korean myself, I’ve always identified with being American and I had no interest in Korean culture at that time). I remember the store had a barter system, and my brother traded off some of his books for new ones. I had no comic books of my own so I asked my uncle to buy the comics I wanted for me. One of the books I got was Uncanny X-Men #218, which had some of the female X-Men battling the Juggernaut. I didn’t know much about the X-Men, but one character in particular caught my eye – she wore a tight black bodysuit and a loose green tank top and had an awesome 80s haircut with a white skunk stripe through it. In the issue, she threw a punch at the Juggernaut, took one in return that launched her into orbit, and then she came back for more. It was a great book, and Rogue became one of my first childhood cartoon character crushes.
What? Stop looking at me like that. I know you had cartoon character crushes when you were a kid, too.
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Curiously, the pop culture comics industries of Japan and the United States do not intersect all that often. Sometimes an American property like Star Wars gets a manga adaptation, and Witchblade has the very rare honor of becoming a full-blown franchise with an anime series and all the ancillary accoutrements – soundtracks, figures, its own manga spinoff, and so on. On this side of the ocean, the two big comics companies toy with Japanese visual style – Marvel occassionally churns out titles in their Mangaverse line, and DC has its Ame-Comi series, a catalogue of mediocre toys done in pseudo-anime style. Usually its up to smaller publishing studios like Udon, Devil’s Due, the long-defunct Dreamwave, and very minor imprints like Alias (who I think are also gone) to create comics in anime style.
So imagine my surprise when I learn that not only will a major Japanese toy manufacturer be making 1/8 scale figures of Marvel characters, but that Shunya Yamashita is going to be the one to do the source designs. This has to be the best thing that’s ever happened in the history of humankind, right? Well …
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Looking back at an older figure in my collection, we have here a figure of Masane Amaha, the heroine of the anime adaptation of Witchblade. This particular 1/6 scale figure is from Kotobukiya, who has put out three other Witchblade figures: one of Masane in casual wear, one in red Witchblade armor, and another one which is identical to this figure other than her paint job, which blackens her legs and torso. I guess the sort of half-nudity rife in the anime Witchblade wouldn’t fly even on Japanese television, so the original broadcast censored the character designs by giving them dark tights. That version seems to be all but forgotten now. As it should be.
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