J-Fan

J-Fan was a magazine created by my brother and myself whilst working at a small (now long dead) publisher. It was one of those real magazines that you used to get, printed on paper and put in proper shops like WH Smith. How we convinced the publisher to do a magazine on anime I'll never know, but it was at a time where there was a potential growing market. Unfortunately that market started to shrink again in the UK and the magazine only lasted 2 issues. Part of this was because WH Smith failed to categorize it correctly and put it in some random place on their shelves where nobody would see, and also that they printed about a billion copies of each issue too many.

We had almost zero budget, not much of a clue and still had to perform our daily jobs of sending out all the post, without being paid a penny more to do it. The magazine was supposed to be an opposite of Anime UK, which I always found a little bland and without humour. We managed to source some decent writers of the time, and the rest was written by us in a mostly Your Sinclair style.

Although I got myself credited for design, I wish to distance myself from most of it. I mostly roughed out the layout and some basic ideas with paper cutouts, but the ghastly mandelbrot backgrounds and poor colour choices were certainly not my idea. The fonts are horrible too. In hindsight, the guy who worked on it there did a piss poor job and was probably colourblind.

Each issue had a couple of free Urusei Yatsura trading cards on the front, which were exclusive to us. I bet they're super rare now.

The samples here have the manga 'Dodekain' edited from them because I don't want to cause some copyright fuss or anything.

 

Issue 3 was getting ready to print when the plug was pulled. I still have some proof pages lying around somewhere but they have temporarily escaped me. If I find them, I will put them up here.