📚 Book Club/Retrospective: Super7 Magazine Issue #1 (2002)
Thought I’d try something a little new to mix-up midweek discussion posts I do. I'll call it a little book club of sorts and retrospective ramblings.
Though I’ve been collecting for a good number of years and love digging through blog posts or old threads across Skullbrain, I never quite got around to reading Super7 magazines. To celebrate their 25th anniversary, Super7 recently highlighted these 15 back-issues on IG. I knew they were available archived online (link here!), but I had only ever scanned a few issues.
In my never-ending quest for sofubi knowledge, I’m sitting down to read these all, taking it one issue at a time every couple of weeks. If you feel inclined to join (whether you’ve read these before or not), let's start with Vol 1. Issue #1. If you want to read ahead, don’t let me stop you!
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Back in 2002, I was still in middle school 😂 completely oblivious to the world of soft vinyl or my future collecting habits, likely on my second playthrough of Final Fantasy X. I’ve certainly heard a lot about this time, but reading this issue I felt transported straight into I suppose the golden era of “modern sofubi collecting” (if I can call it that), where adults were getting into collecting or re-collecting childhood soft vinyls of the '60s, along with brand-new reissues.
In the opening editorial, Mark Nagata mentions his own collecting exploding with the dawn of the internet, eBay, and Yahoo Japan. I couldn't help but laugh, because it feels like we are living through a parallel age right now, where the hobby has really opened up through social media and more accessible proxy options.
The old ads throughout the pages made me smile; seeing mail-in coupons offering a Bear Model Hedorah for $55 or a Club Daikaiju Gorgo set for $79.99 takes me right back to mailing in cereal box barcodes for LEGO sets as a kid. Even cooler, some of the people, shops, and proxy services mentioned are still around today (like Steve Agin who will be at KaijuBrooklyn and M World advertised on the back cover).
I won’t do too much rehashing of every article, but what an incredible resource to learn about the history of sofubi. What stuck out for me:
- Astro-Mu 5: I never knew much about this line, but learning how Nakajima (a smaller, "desperate" firm trying to avoid expensive licensing fees) launched their own completely independent Sentai team is fascinating. They employed hilarious marketing like printing cheap tie-in comics and releasing a vinyl record theme song just to get people thinking a real TV show existed. Plus, learning about clear bodies showing the pipe-cleaner skeletons as an underutilized effect back then and I suppose it’s lasting impression now when you look at how many makers still use clear vinyl to show off internal elements.
- Ultraman: Mark’s breakdown of the Marusan and Bullmark mold transitions was a great read and shed insight on the company themselves. My favorite insight was his note that these vintage sculpts have an serene, "Buddha-like quality", which makes sense when you find out the original Tsuburaya character designers were heavily influenced by real Buddha statues.
- The First Godzilla: Brian Flynn and Mike Johnson’s "Million and One Stupid Variations" article on the first Godzilla vinyl is awesome piece of documentation; the breakdown of the different tails versus the later tooling changes, to the fact that "white/gold eye" variations were actually just a chemical accident where the paint components separated over time!
Anyways, I don’t know if I should make these write-ups longer or shorter moving forward, but I'll leave it at that for our first go-around. I hope to encourage some of you who made it through my ramblings to read and look through all 60+ pages.
Might take some time, but when you're done, I'd love to hear your general thoughts, but some things on my mind:
- For those who were collecting back in the early 2000s, what was your experience like hunting down pieces?
- For those into Jumbo Machinders, does Sean Bonner's ranking of the hardest-to-find (maybe besides Garada K7, which I assume is still #1) still hold true today?
- Is all this early taxonomy surrounding variations still considered accurate in the current meta? Any new discoveries since then?