Part of my thesis research has included digging back through old newspaper reports concerning anime and manga, particularly in the '90s, when both were new to the UK and domestic anime fandom was very much in its infancy. Anime and manga were initially met with curiosity in the press, but a variety of factors (which I will explore in a subsequent post) meant that the coverage soon turned hostile, and remained so until relatively recently.
One such early news article was "Blood and Guts and Bambi Eyes", written by Marya Burgess and printed in the
Guardian 2 supplement in February 1993. Placed alongside a piece titled "Dirty Work" by Nigel Smith, which was about Japanese women standing up to sexual harassment in the workplace, the two were distinct from each other and yet clearly intended to be read as companion pieces – they shared a strapline, which read "Japanese women are standing up to harassment at work, but still the men’s comics are full of sexual violence", and were laid out accompanied by this rather dramatic manga panel:
The newspaper did not identify the manga this was taken from, the caption merely saying it was a "Men's Manga". And having spent enough time looking at '90s newspaper reports about anime and manga to know that no-one was above massaging the truth or outright misrepresenting things for the purpose of a good story back then, I really wanted to know where this art had come from.
There aren't many clues to be gathered from the image, but I thought there were a couple of things I might be able to use as starting points. For one thing, it had to have been published before 1993. The woman's name, according to the katakana on the left of the panel, is "Sophie" or some variant thereof. There's also that very distinctive sword, which looks like it's borrowed heavily from the
Sword of Omens from
Thundercats. I thought it looked like a fantasy title, but it also had a little bit of a CLAMP aesthetic to it, and the woman's costume (from what you can see of it) made me think that it may be
RG Veda.
I truly would have been delighted if it were
RG Veda, or indeed anything by CLAMP, an all-female manga studio whose output is primarily aimed at girls. If it were then
Guardian 2 would have at the very least used a
shōjo manga image as an illustration of manga for men, and if it were
RG Veda then it would have been a title that didn't have its origins in Japanese culture! It would have been quite the "Gotcha!" moment, but it was not to be.
RG Veda has been released in English and enough detail is available about it online to be able to establish that there are no characters in it named "Sophie". Similarly it wasn't
X/1999, despite there being some quite ornate swords in there (but no Sophies), and while I did find one other very early CLAMP title that looked promising,
Derayd, it wasn't right either.
Google searches for what I hoped might be decent keywords also turned up nothing. Even once you filter out the results for Sophie Hatter from
Howl's Moving Castle, you still end up with lots of personal anime and manga pages maintained by people with "Sophie" in their usernames. And sure, that's a distinctive sword, but do you know how many distinctive swords there are in anime and manga? A lot, that's how many!
I needed more eyes on this, so I turned to the
Vintage Anime Fans group on Facebook. There were several suggestions through the day – again, lots of speculation that it may be a CLAMP title (as well as plenty of people saying it definitely wasn't), a few suggestions about the sword (the Sword of Omens came up, of course, as well as the original Soul Edge, and Stormbringer from Michael Moorcock's fantasy novels), and one person saying he'd seen a cosplayer with a similar sword, but that it was "from a hentai" (I did, in fact, check Google to see if this might turn up a lead; funnily enough it did bring me to a
Soul Edge/
Calibur hentai manga that had a whole lot of very improbable anatomy but no panels that looked like this, and now I've sullied my Google search history forever). Someone also suggested
Bastard!!, which certainly fits the aesthetic but also didn't seem to have any characters named Sophie.
It was getting to the end of the day and I was no closer to an answer. Possibilities arose that it may be near impossible to find – it may not have been translated into English, it may actually be a hentai title that doesn't get tracked so readily by online databases, or it could have been a random
dojinshi from the early '90s, in which case I had no hope of knowing what it was. It wasn't essential knowledge for my thesis, for sure. But I'd started looking already, and I'd dragged other people in on it as well now. It would be nice to know something!
Then very late in the evening my phone started buzzing feverishly. Incredibly, someone in the group had not only managed to identify it, they also had scans!
It's from a series called
Blood of Matools, which was serialised in
Dragon Magazine before being released across six volumes between 1992 and 1999. There isn't much information available about it online in English, so it really doesn't seem to have ever been given an English translation (though all six volumes were released in French and, surprisingly, Thai), but it does come up on
MyAnimeList, with this very brief synopsis:
"In order to save his sister who is ill with a strange disease, Kai goes in search of Matools, a legendary beast with blood able to heal any disease. On his journey, he meets Sophy, a young girl also stricken with the same kind of disease..."
Here are some of the cover images:
Sadly, based on the scans that were supplied it seems that
Guardian 2 chose an appropriate title to accompany their article about how "Men's Manga is quite different from women's. It is dedicated to the themes of success, violence and conquest and to attraction to the female body – to romantic love with a very submissive type of woman", so no "Gotcha!" moment for me this time.
This does throw up a few other questions though, mainly stemming from how on earth a sub/production editor for a British newspaper found this panel in the first place. It has never been released in English. It's unlikely to have had the market penetration for it to be well-known even among UK anime fans of the time – it took all day for someone to positively identify it in a global Facebook group populated by dedicated fans with the World Wide Web at their fingertips! Could it have shown up in a stock image gallery somehow? Did the production editor happen to know a Japanese teenager who could supply the image? Was the production editor secretly a really devoted manga fan? Was someone dispatched to a Japanese import bookshop to pick up a magazine that fitted the needs of the article?
These are questions that I doubt I will ever have answers to, sadly. But I can be content with the discovery that it has a title, and if you say it with the right accent it sounds really funny.
Enormous thanks to Walter Amos and Robert Fenelon, who provided the positive identification and the selection of scans for this manga.
Further info:
"Blood and Guts and Bambi Eyes" by Marya Burgess;
Guardian 2; 1 February 1993; pp 12-13
"Dirty Work" by Nigel Smith;
Guardian 2; 1 February 1993; p 12
Image taken from
Blood of Matools; Sawada Hajime; Fujimi Fantasia Comics; Volume 3, p 31
