Issue 6 - July 2015

[Pages:24]Issue 6 - July 2015

Jose Sanchez was born and raised in Miami, Florida on March 10,1968,where he still lives today with his wife Aliana. At the age of six, he was introduced to fingerpainting. By first grade, he had picked up his first pencil, but it was not until the summer of 1977 when Star Wars hit the movie screens across America, that his imaginative spark was truly ignited! Like so many other people that were influenced by the cult phenomenon, he was too. So much so, that this led him to seriously explore and develop his talent for creating art further. As time has gone by and he has honed his skills, he has been notably influenced by the works of Science Fiction and Fantasy artists such as: Stephen Youll, Donato Giancola, Chris Moore, Tim White, Jim Burns, David B. Mattingly and Michael Whelan, to name but a few.

He attended Lindsey-Hopkins Technical Education Education Center in Miami, Florida where he received a certificate in Commercial Art Technology-majoring in illustration and minoring in Graphic Design. Jose would ideally like to see himself one day working professionally in the motion picture industry as a Concept Artist. He had previously worked on a lowbudget SF/Super Hero Animation flick titled: "Shadow Runner", designing the individual character's spaceships. "They tend to depend more on technology than they do on their own superpowers". He is also interested in the publication and gaming markets. To one of his many credits, which have included several fanzine covers and one semi-prozine cover and interior artwork.

Also appearing in the official LucasFilm Star Wars Insider magazines: "City Patrol", was chosen for publication in the March/April 2006/issue #86.

"Oil Bath", "Artoo", "Pair of Jawas" and "Land of the Rising Suns" in April 2014/issue #148 now being published by Titan Publications and online at on the Jan.15,2014 Blog article: Bantha Tracks: Best of the Year, Online edition: "AT-AT Driver" and in the Blog article: Bantha Tracks: Art Galaxy, March 2014 " Djas Puhr-Settling The Score!"

Much of his art can be currently seen at .

Breaking It All Down: The `Zine ? is edited and written by Alexander Case.

Letters of Comment can be sent to alexander.case@. If you've never sent a LoC to me before, please put "LoC:" at the start of the subject line, so it gets filed in the right place.

I also sporadically appear on the Bureau42 Greatest Science Fiction Film Tournament podcast, available through the Bureau42 Master Podcast Audio Feed, which can be found on iTunes and Stitcher.

My YouTube Channel, where the web-series that this fanzine is spun off from. can be found at . user/CountZeroOr

Issue Contents

Letters & Issue Note 5

Movie Review ? Mad Max: Fury Road

7

Fanzine Report ? Royal Space Force 25th Anniversary Fanzine 9

Anime 202: Shows with Prerequisites ? Madoka Magica

10

Video Game Primer: Shin Megami Tensei ? Part 2

15

Letters & Issue Note

Before I get started with the letters, I do need to make a little apology for the delay in this issue. The short version is that I was busy with getting my Senior Project together for my bachelor's degree... followed by getting my Bachelor's degree. Specifically, I now have a Bachelor's of Science in Information Technology ? Health Informatics. This does now mean that I have more time available to work on fanzines ? even once I've gotten my post-graduation job, the job will (hopefully) not require me to bring work home with me to work on off the clock.

Also, all of the SF books I've been reading lately have been for the Hugo Awards, as I'm attending Sasquan, so I don't exactly feel comfortable reviewing them for this `zine, as I don't exactly want to give away how I'm going to vote until after I've voted. So, this is going to be a little more of a Anime & Video Game focused issue than the last few. So, I apologize for all of that in advance. Now, with that out of the way, I've got a letter from Lloyd Penny!

Me at my graduation - Photograph by Rose Case

Dear Alexander:

Many thanks for issue 5 of Breaking It All Down - The Zine. Now to see if I can create another letter of comment for you. Bits of time present themselves, and this might take all day.

I understand why Jerry Kaufman might wonder about the characters that were cosplayed. I didn't recognize most of the characters myself. That's what I get for not watching anime. This past weekend, we were vendors at a local anime/ gaming/cosplay convention, and it was the same there, I saw lots of costumes and cosplay, but didn't know where the characters were from. We might need that information here.

That convention was called Frostcon, and like Kumoricon, it was difficult to find food nearby. Frostcon was in downtown Toronto at the big Sheraton there, and there is a underground shopping pathway with assorted food courts every block or so, but it was still difficult to find a decent lunch. The Subway sub shop had a forty-foot line-up in front of it any time I looked, so lunch was from the local noodle shop, which was a welcome change. It's been a long time since I've seen the idea of a dealer's room in another hotel.

To the best of my knowledge, Toronto used to be a major hub for English dubbing of anime shows. The original Sailor Moon was dubbed here. I wish I could find more voice work like this here, and audition for it.

Time to fold, and fire it off to you. Make a few more of these, okay? See you then.

Yours, Lloyd Penney.

Thanks for the letter, Lloyd! I love getting each letter from you. Currently, from what I understand, the main hubs of voice acting in North America are LA (with Bang Zoom Entertainment) and Houston Texas (where Sentai Filmworks does their dubbing). From what I understand, part of the reason why a lot of the dubbing was done in Canada back in the day was, in part, to get around SAG rules ? often some these anime studios simply couldn't afford to pay SAG rates for the actors, so by operating in Canada, and having the actors act under a psudonym, they could get around some of those rules.

Things have changed considerably since then. Not only is there enough money in the business now that some anime distributors can afford to pay SAG rates, but voice actors from the English dub have started to develop their own fan following as well, so it behooves actors to use their own name over a pseudonym.

Kumoricon is the only con I've attended where the dealer's room has been separate from the main event hotel. Normally, when a con outgrows one hotel, it finds a larger space. That said, I understand the decision. For a couple years, Kumoricon was located at the Portland Hilton Tower (which ? if you've been to downtown Portland ? is about a block from the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall). That location was, frankly, something of a hot mess.

The hotel itself was a very nice place, but... well, the internal flow of the building ? from the width of corridors to the stairway down to the ballroom level ? was absolutely wrong for an anime convention. There were just too many choke-points in the hotel, and it felt like there was a running fight between the con staff and the hotel to find ways for people to get access to the dealer's room and the game rooms. Indeed, there was a chunk of the first day where the dealer's room had been closed by the hotel, and the con had to scramble to find a new route to give people access to the room.

While the hotel had a park adjacent to it, due to the wind tunnel effect of Portland's streets, it was kind of cold and dark, so attendees were more likely to congregate around the hotel, and the streets around the hotel, instead of cosplayers (and cosplay photo shoots) more organically spilling out into the park. Probably the Lloyd Center Hilton (where Orycon has historically been held) might have been a better fit.

Moving back to the two-hotel thing, I think the reason why it's working for Kumoricon and not as much for other hotels, is because of geography and time of year ? Labor day weekend in Vancouver Washington is nice enough that it makes the walk between the two hotels pleasant, combined with the second hotel being on the Colombia, making it a nice place to stay and generally hang out.

Finally, on the cosplay front ? if you come across someone cosplaying as a character you don't recognize, please feel free (with the cosplayer's permission of course), to take a picture and send it to me ? and I'll happily identify the show. Heck, I could probably get a column out of that.

Movie Review ? Mad Max: Fury Road

The Mad Max films are movies that have historically been better known for their action and world-building than their narrative depth. In the first film we saw a world on the brink of destruction, where society was about to fall, and was desperately hanging on to the vest ages of society and civilization by their fingernails, in the hopes that maybe, maybe it could claw its way back over the top of the cliff, though it knew in its heart of hearts that the fall was inevitable.

In The Road Warrior, the world had fallen, with some few bastions of civilization holding on to what resources they had, while marauding bands of bandits preyed on those who wouldn't or couldn't remain mobile. Max himself had become a marauder as well, one who had lost touch or was slowly losing touch with his own humanity. In the final film of the original trilogy, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the world had started to rebuild itself. There are no real organized multi-settlement governments, but the world had developed to a point where there were needs for places like Bartertown, places where people could come and trade goods and services, without being raided and attacked, and why draconian rules like those of Auntie Entity were vital to preserve the relative piece of Bartertown as a sort of safe free port.

While there was very little continuity in-between films (Bruce Spence returned in Beyond Thunderdome, but not as the Gyro pilot), there was continuity in world-building. Fury Road loses some of this continuity, but the narrative depth the film gains, and the incredibly well shot action really makes up for it.

In this film, Max Rocketansky, who is still driving the last of the V8 Interceptors and is now played by Tom Hardy, is captured by the forces of Immortan Joe. Joe and his men seize the Interceptor and, as Max's blood-type is "O", uses him as a "Blood Bag" for his War Boys ? young men with terminal cancer, who Joe has whipped into a frenzy with his Death-Cult of Personality. When Imperiator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), the driver of one of Joe's War Rigs, rescues the women from Joe's Harem, Joe, along with his allies from two other settlements, sets out in pursuit, with Max tied to one of Joe's War Boys, Nux. The rest of the film has Max breaking free of Joe's forces, joining up with Furiosa, and helping her and Joe's former concubines escape.

Max is less of the lead in this film as he is an audience perspective character. He provides us our insight at the beginning of the film into how Joe's settlement, The Citadel, works. Later in the film he similarly serves as a sounding board for the Concubines and Furiosa. Indeed, for about the first 1/3rd-1/2 of the film, Max has almost no lines, due to being muzzled, and instead Tom Hardy has to characterize his version of Max through expressions.

Charlize Theron instead gets a big focus when it comes to the film's narrative. She's more active character in the narrative and she has much more agency (for lack of a better term), in terms of the plot. Furiosa is both literally and figuratively driving this story. Max is, for much of the film, along for the ride.

The film's conscience, on the other hand, lies with the five women who are Joe's brides. They help get the film's message across, that men like Joe were basically responsible for burning the world (indeed Joe's wardrobe suggests and the prequel comics by George Miller confirm that Joe was in the military in the beforetimes). In order for the world After the Bomb to get better, someone else has to be in charge. It makes for a great

tonal hook for the story. As has frequently been mentioned, it gives the film a feminist interpretation, but I'd say it also gives the film an interesting youth-empowerment message as well. The film does a great job of showing that the War Boys, like Nux are in many ways Joe's victims as well.

Additionally, the film's action sequences are incredibly well done. Basically all of the film (with the notable exception of Furiosa's prosthetic right arm and the massive sandstorm from the trailers) is done with practical effects. The action scenes are very tightly edited, with quick cuts that maintain a sense of continuity and geography. The film's massive road war, which takes up the majority of the film is also very much worth noting... because it takes up the majority of the film. The movie has an incredibly strong sense of geography that it preserves through these sequences, providing a real sense of progression through the film's environments ? something the chases in The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome lacked. Additionally the length and scope of the chase really causes the film to justify calling it a "road war", as it makes the climactic chases from last two films in the series look like skirmishes by comparison.

I really suspect that this movie is going to get a lot of very deserved award nominations next year.

Fanzine Report ? Royal Space Force 25th Anniversary Fanzine

Technically, I had to pay money to get this from , but I suspect that the price was set to cover the printing costs, so I'm not sure if this technically a fanzine or a Semi-Pro-zine.

Anyway, this `zine was put together in honor of the 25th anniversary of the Anime film Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise by Carl Gustav Horn, a long time anime fan who has gone pro and is working as an editor for Dark Horse Comics manga division, after previously editing manga for Viz Media (including previous volumes of the English release of the Neon Genesis Evangelion manga), and editing their Animerica magazine.

I bring this up because, not to take anything away from the other fanzines I've read, but the layout here is absolutely fantastic. This is really professional grade stuff, with nicely done photo collages illustrating the various essays, as well as some really well laid-out stills from the film, which illustrate some of the detail put into the film's animation incredibly well. It's definitely a work laid out to be printed on nice paper, and in color (which is, I suspect, why Carl put it out through MagCloud).

The fanzine itself, which is a one-shot, is made up of a series of essays by Horn, and other anime fan writers about the film itself ? in particular Gerald Rathkolb and Erin Finnegan of the off-again/on-again "Anime World Order" podcast, and Tim Maughan, a columnist for Anime News Network and Otaku USA Magazine. The essays run the gamut from the writers impressions and first experiences with the film (and, in some cases anime in general), to a discussion of how the film got made in the first place.

That story behind Royal Space Force's production is definitely worth telling in brief ? Hideaki Anno and Hiroyuki Yamaga were involved with the organization of several Japanese SF conventions held in the Osaka area. These conventions were part of a traveling convention (sort of like WorldCon) and the Osakan events were titled "Dai-Con", as a double pun ? Dai means big in Japanese, so "Big-Con", and referencing "Deikon" a form of radish (well, mix of radish and turnip) raised in Osaka and used in Japanese cuisine. As part of these events, the con committee started up "Daicon Film", a studio to make short films to be played during the opening ceremonies. The animated film made for the fourth Daicon (which can be viewed online here ? . watch?v=Nkc4eBCy3Sk), caught the attention of a producer at Bandai Visual, who basically went to Daicon Film with a truckload of cash and said "Make a movie!" They did, and that film was Royal Space Force.

The essays are generally well written ? all of the personal testimonials are speaking straight from the heart ? and the historical pieces are generally written by Horn, who has some close contacts with GAINAX both from his time writing for Animerica and his attempt in college to actually translate and theatrically release Royal Space Force in the US, albeit in a limited theatrical run.

The fanzine is available from for $16.00 US, plus shipping - browse/issue/487410

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