Artefacts of Geek Days Past: Anime Babes

Portrait of Lisa Munns with Anime Babes mascot Jojo the Shojo. Art by Lisa Tse, photo courtesy of Laura Watton

Despite what the actual recorded history of the demographics of geeky fandoms shows, there is a long-standing belief that sci-fi, fantasy, video games etc are "boys' stuff", and female fans of these things are mere outliers. The same was very much the case in the '90s when anime was first released in the UK and consciously marketed as a Japanese cultural product (as distinct from the localised series like Marine Boy and Battle of the Planets that we'd been watching on TV for years). A big contributing factor in this was the fact that Manga Video, which grew from Island World Communications and dominated the anime market in the UK for most of the '90s, made a conscious decision to market their releases to a young male audience, looking to continue the success they had enjoyed with Akira. By June 1994, Manga Video had released almost 30 titles in the UK, almost all of which were either sci-fi or fantasy/horror (the only exceptions to this were action thrillers Golgo 13 and Crying Freeman, and farcical sex comedy Ultimate Teacher, none of which suggested Manga were thinking of a female audience). The resulting public perception, which is reflected in both mainstream press coverage and the BBFC annual reports from the '90s, was that anime was all sex, violence and tentacles, and not at all female-friendly.

As a female fan at the time, this was deeply frustrating. There were softer, cuter, or more comedic titles with better female representation available in the UK in the '90s - Oh My Goddess!, Urusei Yatsura, and Bubblegum Crisis were all released by Anime Projects, while Pioneer had Tenchi Muyo, Moldiver, and El Hazard, which mainly picked up PG or 12 certificates from the BBFC - but they just didn't command the same attention that Manga's output did. From my personal perspective, as a fan in a small town in Ireland, these titles may as well have been unicorns - my local video shop carried two or three Manga tapes (one of which was always Legend of the Overfiend, which no-one ever seemed to want to touch, let alone buy), and every now and again they'd randomly have a copy of Armitage III or something with a similar aesthetic. If I wanted a decent selection of anime, I had to hitch a ride to Belfast and hope for the best (this was also the only way I was able to get hold of stuff that wasn't dubbed). I took what I could get and endured the disapproving looks and sneering that came with being an anime fan.

Anime Babes flyer, featuring art by Laura Watton

So when I heard about Anime Babes, I was beside myself with excitement. I found out about it because I happened to pick up a copy of the short-lived magazine J-Fan that my local newsagent got hold of somehow. That magazine was instrumental in introducing me to organised anime fandom in the UK - the issue included a con report from ReContanimeTed, which ran in November 1995, and I was amazed and delighted to see photos of cosplayers in the article. I was already into costuming by then, but only for Halloween purposes, so finding out that there were such things as anime conventions and that cosplay was something that lots of people did at them was a revelation. It also included a brief mention of this new anime fan club that was just for girls. I sent a letter to the contact address in the magazine and eagerly awaited the day I'd hear back from them.

 

The letter that followed included information about the club and how to join. It was set up by Lisa Munns and Laura Watton, and a bit later on, Lisa Tse joined the team (a fourth girl, Ami Clark, was mentioned in the original information sheet but I have been unsuccessful in tracking her down - she seems to have vanished into the ether). You could join by sending off £1.50 or some first-class stamps; this was purely to cover the cost of sending out the quarterly fanzine that the club produced. Membership also got you a list of contact details for the other members, so if you wanted to trade tapes, merchandise, or letters with anyone you could easily write to them (email addresses were not widely used at the time). The original plan was that Anime Babes was going to act as a pressure group, building up a following of female fans so they could petition video companies and, if not get more female-friendly anime out there, at least make people aware that female fans of anime did exist and we were sick of being neglected. The letter-writing didn't work out in the end, but the guiding principle of uniting female fans and giving us an outlet to share our art, writing, and passion with each other remained.

One of the things that amazed me about Anime Babes early on was that Lisa herself was so young - barely a year older than I was. I truly had visions of her being a grown adult running a professional operation! In fact, I recall most of the club members being in their mid to late teens, with only a few who were in their 20s. We were also mostly UK-based, though there were one or two who hailed from the US.

Anime Babes issues 1-4. Photo courtesy of Laura Watton

There were four issues of the fanzine in the end, produced from late 1995 until the end of 1996. The first was A5 size and simply stapled in the centre fold, but it underwent a format change when Lisa Tse came onboard as designer, so the remaining three issues were A4 size and had a much more professional finish. Fan club members got their copies for free, but non-members could buy copies from Lisa directly, and they were also sold from dealer's tables at Minamicon in 1996 and Shinnenkai in 1997. One regular feature was an artist's showcase, which was a spread of pieces of fan art by a selected club member (I got featured in one of these despite my talents lying far more with writing than with art - I'm a bit more self-aware about my abilities now but I was super proud of it at the time!). There was also a letters page and a section for reviews of other fanzines, and a couple of issues featured "The O Files", which was a collection of short profiles of the various fanzine contributors (yep, I had one of those too). There were no real, set in stone submission guidelines for the fanzine so there was a real mix of content in each issue, and it was almost entirely female-driven. I think this is also the place where I got my first bit of long-form writing published - an article about censorship in anime that I had repurposed from an essay I wrote for my English class at school, which was printed in issue 3. Lisa got another artist, Emmeline Dobson, to do some fantastic pictures to accompany the article, which I was really excited by. It's a shame the article itself was absolute bobbins and I don't like to speak of it now. Helen McCarthy herself gave me a thorough dressing down for it in issue 4, an honour which I didn't appreciate as much as I should have at the time...!

The club sadly closed down after the release of the fourth issue as Lisa M, Lisa T and Laura were all embarking on either their GCSEs or A-levels and didn't have the time to work on it anymore. I was heartbroken when I read the letter enclosed with the fanzine. Anime Babes had been a big part of my life for that year - I literally used to carry my copies around with me all the time and re-read them constantly! - and it was my biggest introduction to anime fandom, and to other fans, in the UK. There are people I am still friends with who I got to know as a result of Anime Babes. It put me in contact with fellow Cyber City Oedo 808 fan and amazing artist Vanessa Wells, and we then teamed up to produce our own fanzine, CyberAge, which ran for three issues and was met with fairly universal acclaim (and which I will write about in a future blog post). When I finished my Master's degree in 2004 and interviewed for my first journalism job, I brought my copies of CyberAge along with me to show as examples of my writing style - it's no exaggeration that I would not have landed in my career without CyberAge, and there would have been no CyberAge without Anime Babes.

And, when you look back on it, there was so much about Anime Babes that was quite revolutionary, even if we didn't realise it at the time. It was a club with its own fanzine that was run and produced entirely by teenage girls, who were driven by little more than a passion for anime and a compulsion to join forces and make themselves heard, at a time when the internet was still very new and unsophisticated - it's incredible to look at the old issues and see that Lisa was using a Compuserve email address, with its username made up of a string of digits! It was also a safe space where, through the membership contact lists, female fans could talk and trade with each other freely - thankfully none of the girls I randomly phoned after asking Directory Enquiries for their details ever seemed to judge me for doing it! In my day-to-day role now I frequently order printed booklets from companies like Solopress, and it's so strange to think of how easy and inexpensive it would be for me to compile and print a professional-looking, full-colour, perfect bound magazine today, when back in the '90s it was done using basic word processing and DTP software, home printers, and photocopiers, with no small amount of manual labour on the part of whoever was editing the fanzine. This was all done for no material profit. It was a very real labour of love for all concerned.

More than anything, it stands as an expression of the determination of female fans. We took the fandom that already existed, said "nah, not completely happy with this," and created the space we wanted to have within that fandom. Helen McCarthy summed it up wonderfully when she namechecked Anime Babes in her keynote address at the Media Journeys: Animation in Transnational Contexts symposium held at UEA in May 2018:

"... we had a group of very feisty, very talented, ferocious teenage girls who banded together to set up a club called Anime Babes, and claimed the turf. They said, 'this doesn’t belong to guys. This belongs to us. Deal with it.' And I was so proud of them. They were all so amazingly talented, and many of them are still active in the industry today."

Lisa M caught the attention of the Sci-FI Channel and was, in her capacity as the founder of Anime Babes, one of a number of talking heads who featured in between programmes when they ran an all-night programme of anime movies on New Year's Eve 1996, along with Helen McCarthy, Steve Kyte, and Jonathan Clements amongst others. Laura is a prolific freelance artist and was one of the founding members of Sweatdrop Studios, which has been in operation for almost 20 years and publishes comics and original graphic novels - other female artists to have attained success as a result of working with Sweatdrop include Manga Shakespeare artists Emma Vieceli and Sonia Leong, illustrator and Momiji Doll designer Joanna Zhou, and graphic artist Morag Lewis. Lisa T went on to establish her own creative branding agency and now supports a wide range of philanthropic causes.

And, on a personal level, here I am, writing a thesis that will hopefully become a book one day, and working to document the history of anime fandom in the UK. Anime Babes is a vital part of that history.

As I discovered through my demographic research of anime fans in 2016-17, the gender divide among UK anime fans under 30 is now over 50% female, and there's also an increasing number of fans whose gender identities sit outside the male/female binary. And I can't help but think, if those of us who were Anime Babes members 20 years ago knew that this was where we'd end up, we'd have all been really proud.