The internet seems to get the bad reputation that whatever goes up online will always stay forever. This belief really applies to those who post up drunken frat party pictures that were never meant to be seen by the public eye, but oh well the world knows about it now. However, that belief can work for the benefit for good, especially when it comes to the preservation of printed media that most people would have thought was lost to time and landfills.

I happen to be someone that is a full believer and participator to online archiving, especially when it comes to printed media for fandom. It's one of my hobbies that I happen to collect and archive printed media on my personal blog at The Anime of Yesteryear, which will soon be celebrating its 6th year on the internet. Archiving for me kind of happened when I realized what I had in my collection at the time and wanted to share it with the internet, and I have been actively keeping that blog up over the years. I understand that I am one voice in a sea of millions of blogs out there, but it’s my voice and my interest, and people are always welcome to come and check it out.

The more I seem to archive, the more I see a need for it online. I guess without even knowing it, I’ve become a preserver of the past, only because I feel that it has some relevancy to the fandom that I happen to be involved. Printed magazines were the way to get news in anime fandom going back 30 years at this point, starting out with early fanzines done through mail order methods that were headed up by members of a local anime club chapter. Eventually, circulation began to happen to get out to a larger audience than just mail order, so magazines like ANIMAG were one of the first major publications to reach a mass audience, which later became Animerica. I started my collection with Animerica, so that particular magazine has always and will always be essential to what I scan and post online.

To give a brief history on anime publications, one of the first attempts to get anime out there in print form commercially was ANIMAG. The magazine was headed up by Matthew Anacleto, Ann Schubert, and Dana Fong as the original magazine founders. The people I have had the pleasure of meeting over the years were the editor Trish Ledoux and her now husband translator Toshifumi Yoshida. Both have been in the anime industry since the late 1980's, and both were fans of anime before they had their hand in it. Over time and a handful of issues later, ANIMAG became evolved to Animerica, being the flagship magazine for VIZ for roughly 15 years. I've had the pleasure meeting both Trish and Toshifumi at anime cons over the years, and got a handful of my issues signed by them, and to share a few stories about the anime industry from time to time.

Of course, Animerica wasn’t the only kid on the anime print block. Eventually Wizard Entertainment had their own edition of Anime Insider to try and break in the market of anime publication magazines. It only lasted a few years, but they never got the numbers that Animerica were able to bring in and eventually Wizard folded that publication. In December of 2002, ADV launched their own publication with the same name as the major anime magazine in Japan, Newtype. ADV wanted to no confusion between the two and had it named Newtype USA, which lasted a few years before becoming a general nerd magazine PiQ which only lasted a handful of issues before being canned. Newtype USA mostly consisted of articles that were made to promote new series coming to America, but always seemed to make ADV titles sound as appealing as possible to the audience, despite if the fans thought the shows were trash to begin with. Newtype USA did bring in some interesting writers like Fred Patton, which Patton has been a major writer and former co-head of Streamline Pictures. Patton’s career spans back to the early days of anime fandom in the mid to late 1970’s. Another publication was V.Max, that only lasted a handful of issues for a couple of years in the early 1990’s before folding.

Across the pond and north of the border, the Brits and Canadians had their own magazines. In Canada, Protoculture Addicts was another mail order magazine that still exist to this day. Originally starting out as a Robotech fanzine, it later morphed into another anime themed magazine that started around the same time as ANIMAG. In Britain, Anime UK was the brits Animerica which lasted only a few years as well. It featured well known academic contributors to anime fandom like Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy, both who worked on the seemingly-never-ending editions of The Anime Encyclopedia.

With the internet being ever so existent in today’s society to receive the digital word, is there even a point of having anime in print form? The answer is yes, since there are a couple of major publications still existing to this day. The current “newsstand ready” issues would be Otaku USA in America and Neo Magazine in Britain. Both still have a strong number of readers and subscribers that still want their printed anime news at bookstore shelves. With a need of publications still being around for anime fans to get physical copies of their anime information and reviews, there will still be a need for people like myself to archive these issues in the future when these publications cease to exist.

There are numerous people that do what I do, some who are not as known like myself, and others who have gained some popularity. Of course not all publicity is good publicity when it comes to archiving, since recently Jason Scott last year had uploaded every issue of Nintendo Power on archive.org for the public to read their old favorite issues going back almost 30 years. Eventually, word got out to Nintendo, and Nintendo being the big company they are, wasn’t going to let these archives “damage” the good name of Nintendo and ordered a cease and desist against Scott. These are challenges that would face archivist like myself that eventually if companies do care about a dead publication that they still have rights too, they can make these kinds of threats. Archiving works as a double edge sword, and challenges like Scott's predicament tend to rear up once in a while. For me personally, I will continue to do what I do for as long as possible, because I know there are people out there that do care and want to see evidence of what anime fandom was like a couple of decades ago, that only exists in printed form. Not everyone can own these magazines, and for those that are left, the digital age is the only current way to preserve them for a public audience. For that reason, this is why I do this as a hobby, and I do enjoy what I do.