Scanned Copy of COMIC BOX 1997's End of Evangelion Issue & Fan Discussion

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Ashwing
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Scanned Copy of COMIC BOX 1997's End of Evangelion Issue & Fan Discussion

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Postby Ashwing » Sun Jan 22, 2023 11:06 pm

Hello forums - a follow-up on this post I made; for a while I had no leads and had given up, but while placing an order for some unrelated art books I stumbled on an auction for a copy and was able to acquire one! To summarize, COMIC BOX was an alt-style anime magazine in the 1980's and 1990's in Japan, one that would often discuss doujinshi and fan works. They ran an issue in 1997 for the release of End of Evangelion, with the relevant section being titled "What was the phenomenon called Evangelion?" - it contained essays, comics, and art from fans discussing what Evangelion meant to them. I think it serves as a really neat time capsule of how the fandom in Japan thought about Evangelion at the time, from discussing "TV vs Film ending" to their obvious preference for Rei over Asuka lol.

I have uploaded a copy to the Internet Archive here, and I have a little more discussion and lower-sized versions of the images on my blog over here. Its pretty NSFW but also has some beautiful art and interesting commentary.

Its all in Japanese of course, my hope is to translate it but that will be quite a project. Certainly part of my motivation in posting is to see if others out there are motivated by it and could contribute any translations, definitely reach out or spread the word if anyone you know might be interested. I do have a few japanese-proficient partners I will see how far I can get with. Will update if that time comes! Hopefully it is still valuable as a standalone art collection and general contribution to the record of Eva documents out there accesible to us all.

kuribo-04
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Re: Scanned Copy of COMIC BOX 1997's End of Evangelion Issue & Fan Discussion

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Postby kuribo-04 » Sun Jan 22, 2023 11:45 pm

Awesome! :)
Will check it out.
Shinji: "Sooner or later I'll be betrayed... And they'll leave me. Still... I want to meet them again, because I believe my feelings at that time were real."
Ryuko: "I'm gonna knock ya on your asses!"
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Ashwing
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Re: Scanned Copy of COMIC BOX 1997's End of Evangelion Issue & Fan Discussion

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Postby Ashwing » Mon Jan 23, 2023 12:17 am

Glad I could follow up for you from the previous thread! There were a few people on various locales who were interested so its nice to know I could deliver ^_^

Zeruel48
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Re: Scanned Copy of COMIC BOX 1997's End of Evangelion Issue & Fan Discussion

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Postby Zeruel48 » Thu Jan 26, 2023 10:21 pm

Pretty well done, I noticed a few issues in the PDF on Archive.org but it's nice to get these things newly scanned and not stuck as low res jpegs from 2008 (or arguably worse, just not online at all)
-I think working with/exporting lossless PNGs would be better for archival means, the compression is generally not super noticeable but it's apparent around the edges of black text above white.
-Releasing this as a collection of images would be better than putting them in a PDF, from what I can tell even the Library of Congress says "PDF is not a preferred archival or master format for images."
-There's a sort of splice effect that can hurt text/half-tone based images (https://i.imgur.com/T77YaFo.jpg)

I'm assuming the colored images are descreened somehow, it's very well done compared to a lot of other projects like this which use poor filtering.

Ashwing
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Re: Scanned Copy of COMIC BOX 1997's End of Evangelion Issue & Fan Discussion

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Postby Ashwing » Sat Feb 11, 2023 2:36 pm

View Original PostZeruel48 wrote:Pretty well done, I noticed a few issues in the PDF on Archive.org but it's nice to get these things newly scanned and not stuck as low res jpegs from 2008 (or arguably worse, just not online at all)
-I think working with/exporting lossless PNGs would be better for archival means, the compression is generally not super noticeable but it's apparent around the edges of black text above white.
-Releasing this as a collection of images would be better than putting them in a PDF, from what I can tell even the Library of Congress says "PDF is not a preferred archival or master format for images."
-There's a sort of splice effect that can hurt text/half-tone based images (https://i.imgur.com/T77YaFo.jpg)

I'm assuming the colored images are descreened somehow, it's very well done compared to a lot of other projects like this which use poor filtering.


Thank you for the feedback! I am 100% new to this so honestly I appreciate the advice.

-I assembled the PDF out of PNG's so I have now added a zip archive of the PNG's - hopefully at a high enough resolution, had to balance file size with quality of course, but I think they look good. Two of the PNG's are for unknown reasons a lower DPI, it be that way :/

-The pdf is for readability in my opinion - you are right its not as ideal for 'preservation', but if you want to read it as a magazine I know most people find the individual png's frustrating . Still my thought was also that I am hoping to, as you mentioned, the 'tone' effect from scanning is absolutely noticable. As a newbie I am hoping to do the research and figure that how to descreen/ remove the moiré, and upload a better quality. I just wanted to make sure it was accessible first since I may not figure out how to do it. And now the PNG's are there too, so its available in both formats.

Definitely let me know if you have any tips on how to touch them up in Premiere or the like - I also want to OCR them and see if any translation of it is doable, but baby steps as it were.

Ashwing
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Re: Scanned Copy of COMIC BOX 1997's End of Evangelion Issue & Fan Discussion

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Postby Ashwing » Mon Mar 06, 2023 11:24 pm

Just to update anyone who comes across this thread, I have been posting translations w/ a little commentary of the magazine on my blog: [https://simulacrarealities.substack.com/p/comic-box-1997-end-of-evangelion]

Hopefully it is helpful to anyone who stumbles across it, I definitely think its a really valuable data source on both critic and fan perceptions of the era.


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