Criticism: Osamu Tezuka's Rebellious Fans - The Mysterious Unico Shobō Shinsha
(The front cover of Unico Shobō Shinsha's reproduced works of Osamu Tezuka's Unico. Published possibly between 1979 to early 1980, these works feature innocuously printed textless covers made from simple color-blocked pulp, oftentimes with interior drawings and unrelated compilations of shoujo works. Personal collection.)
Among the more elusive materials surviving from the late Shōwa-era manga underground in Mad Angler Press' libary are a small group of crudely bound, oftentimes red-covered books attributed to an otherwise poorly documented circle calling itself Unico (ユニコ), or, in its more elaborate imprint form, Unico Shobō Shinsha (ユニコ書房新社). Dating approximately from 1976 through early 1979, with the possibility of production extending into early 1980, these volumes occupy an unstable position within the history of early Comiket adjacent doujinshi and print culture. While they actively resemble fan publications, they are, in every since of the word, a nod to commercial bootlegs. Uncovering these work as not being private reproductions, these bootlegs hold a unique mantle in being an anachronistic continuation of the postwar akahon tradition.
While these surviving examples' principal subject is Osamu Tezuka's Unico, once serialized in Sanrio's Lyrica (リリカ) from November 1976 through March 1979, the circumstances of their production and circulation remain relatively obscure. Acquired via M, who is assisting with a massive cleanout alongside our mutual friend of a family member's estate, there is no presently accessible documentation adequately establishes the active membership numbers of the circle, though it does not clearly bear any relationship to Tezuka's official fan organizations, such as Mushi no Shirase or The Nagoya Letter. The scale of the production, or whether the books were distributed through correspondence, private gatherings, fan conventions, or informal retail networks, is also relatively mysterious, though based on their binding and their presence in a lot of fan club related works, they were clearly collected. Thus, consequently, the surviving books themselves become the primary evidence through which the activities of this ephemeral publishing circle can be reconstructed.
What makes the Unico Shobō Shinsha material particularly significant is that it purposefully reproduced Tezuka's works without authorization. Unauthorized reproduction was hardly unprecedented in post-war Japanese manga culture, however, in the pastiche of non-officially affiliated fan clubs such as the previously covered TOKYO (later Metropolis), Unico Shobō Shinsha seems to have been purposefully created as a subset of a fan club that was established by the name of Unico in 1976 proper. Upon speaking with my colleague about these works, they had actively been stored away since 1980 to 1981, effectively closing a rather large window in the time in which they were acquired.
Even more uniquely is how these texts demonstrate how technologies and access played a major part in their production.
Each page of the presumed 'volume 1' feel thin, slightly fibrous, yet somewhat absorbent. While not glossy, the paper itself is lightweight uncoated printing paper. Japanese manga printing has had a long relationship with inexpensive, lower-grade papers. The Japanese Printing Museum's reference material specifically identifies insatsu senkashi (印刷せんか紙) as a relatively low-grade, rough-surfaced printing paper used extensively for manga magazines; it was commonly manufactured from recycled newspaper stock and printing waste. However, there seems to be something far different in that regard for this particular set of texts. Insatsu senkashi was especially associated with inexpensive manga magazine interiors, often using colored paper to disguise the grayish appearance of recycled fibers, whereas these texts use a rather inexpensive white / lightweight offset stock selected so that it could accept process color while keeping the production cost down.
By the 1970s, four-color web offset printing had become common for certain applications such as newspaper inserts. While not true CMYK printing, these copies appear to actually be offset lithography using four color separation. The random inclusions of shoujo manga connoted this as a clue for me personally as many pages used are clearly taken from a photographic reproduction archive of previously prepared material and simply were incorporated based on whatever source pages were available. As none of the unrelated manga pages have the exact same halftone structure, color density, paper behavior, and registration as the Unico pages, I would suspect they went through the same production run through clearly from different sources.
(A foldout ad is included in one text for The Piazza Rose Shop, a business that was once located in Harajuku that was open during most of the 1970s, dating some of these works between 1978 to 1979 easily. Whether this shop was affiliated with Unico Shobō Shinsha however is uncertain or unknown.)
The timing of the Unico Shobō Shinsha publications is essential. Unico was not initially published as an ordinary mass-market tankōbon as Tezuka's story appeared in Sanrio's Lyrica, a visually distinctive shoujo magazine whose experimental format was partly conceived with an overseas theme in mind - the magazine, horizontally written, left-bound, and using full-color printing akin to American editions of Seventeen magazine or Britain's Jackie, Tezuka's early Unico pages exploited this unusual format through expansive, borderless compositions and color reproduction that mirrored European fairy tail books.
The serial itself, which ran from November 1976 to March of 1979, encompassed twenty-nine issues of Lyrica. With that said, the publication was released with a relatively narrow temporal window and, crucially, a magazine-based mode of circulation. A reader wishing to possess the complete work in its original form had to acquire the relevant issues as they appeared, thus limiting accessibility. Could these works have been produced for rural or otherwise distant fans in mind? A particular issue holds a fold out ad for the formerly operational Piazza Rose Shop in Harajuku, Tokyo, is included within the text - while a clearly non-rural, commercial establishment, this location boasted another fanciful element to these works and what they could possibly represent.
The books attributed to Unico Shobō Shinsha appear, at least in part, to have transformed a serialized magazine work into a portable and repeatable object. While reproducing pages from Lyrica, many of the Unico works are deliberately reformatted. Others contain conspicuous errors, incomplete reproductions, misplaced material, and unrelated shoujo manga material from approximately the late 1960s through the mid-1970s.
(Many of the works feature drawings and motifs based on Tezuka works as well as Shoujo comics - Ricky from Zero Men appears in a few issues like so. Supplemental drawings being included in these works connotes their doujinshi narrative and fan quality.)
While its tempting to describe such publications simply as "bootleg doujinshi," the pure designation risks obscuring a longer history of unofficial manga circulation. The immediate postwar akahon (赤本) economy provides an important precedent as to why these works are, to any extent, not simply unofficially reproduced works. During the late 1940s and 1950s, inexpensive manga books circulated through distribution channels outside the principal commercial publishing system, including candy stores and other informal retail environments.
Akahon subsequently gave way, in part, to the expanding kashihon (貸本) system, in which specialized lending shops became important intermediaries for manga distribution. The National Diet Library's reference materials describe the transition from the inexpensive akahon market toward lending libraries and specialized kashihon publishing during the 1950s, namely due to the financial strains experienced by post-war Japan. Due to the already rigid publishing system present, extreme post-war economic austerity, high paper costs, and a pre-existing commercial publishing market, most books were too expensive for common families to buy and were thus regaled to rental shops.
The history is particularly relevant to Tezuka via New Treasure Island (Shin Takarajima), whereas his early commercial success cannot be separated from the alternative publishing and distribution structures that preceded the consolidation of the modern manga industry. The surviving historiography of post-war akahon and kashihon culture consequently placed Tezuka near the center of a transformation in which manga moved from relatively marginal, inexpensive print commodities toward the increasingly standardized magazine and book publishing system that would dominate the following decades. Tezuka's works, while suddenly popular, experienced their share of early bootlegging as well - many artists were made to trace and copy his works to repackage by other companies willing to capitalize on the aesthetic success of his manuscripts, a notion that would rankle him deeply.
Works by Unico Shobō Shinsha are not akahon in any strict historical or bibliographical sense. Their production belongs to a completely different technological and commercial environment, yet their physical and economic logic is strangely familiar: relatively inexpensive materials, limited circulation, reproduction outside conventional publishing channels, and a clearly presumed readership whose desire for particular manga works exceeded what ordinary distribution could conveniently provide. In this sense, the books might be understood as neo-akahon objects; not historically akahon, but participating in a comparable economy of unauthorized reproduction and informal transmission that was growing stronger every moment in the wake of Comiket and related events by the late 1970s.
The physical construction of the books strengthens this interpretation of neo-akahon. While these surviving examples are often characterized by red covers produced on relatively inexpensive pulp-like stock and interiors printed on exceptionally thin paper, other works feature cheery, summery colors and motifs, clearly intended for a female audience's appreciation. While the interior reproduction can be surprisingly sophisticated, including four-color separation printing of a quality considerably beyond what one might expect from the term "bootleg", the tension between the cheap materiality with ambitious reproduction makes each object historically revealing in the wake of early doujinshi sensibilities.
While they are not designed to imitate the prestige of a commercial book perfectly, they instead appear to prioritize the preservation and transmission of the manga itself. The disposable physical substrate becomes secondary to the acquisition of otherwise difficult-to-obtain content, especially for younger or rural fans who possibly didn't have access to Unico. Here the apparent contradiction of the books becomes productive: poor paper, relatively sophisticated color reproduction, incomplete editorial control, and considerable investment in reproducing the source material.
The Unico books also invite a more complicated reading of gender and fandom. Unico, while initially published in a shoujo magazine. This alone does not establish that the producers of Unico Shobō Shinsha were women, however, the circle's apparent association with Unico can retroactively be converted into reaching a primarily female readership. Nevertheless, the books belong to a period in which the women's manga fandom was becoming an increasingly consequential cultural force, particularly through amateur publishing and fan-organized networks, be it through the Year 24 Group or otherwise.
(Volume 3 of Manga no Mushi, published in 1978. Collaborated on between both Osamu Tezuka and Naoko Okada, this particular issue focuses on Year 24 Group greats such as Keiko Takemiya, Yoshiko Tsuchida, Eiko Mizuno, Moto Hagio and Maki Sato. The interplay of Princess Knight's importance on these authors as well as coverage on fan club meet ups and events bolstered information and gives credence to the importance of women's shoujo manga during the late 1970s. Personal collection.)
(Coverage of Osamu Tezuka's Princess Knight and its importance in the pantheon of shoujo works via Manga no Mushi.)
The commercial manga industry of the 1970s could define readers as consumers: girls who purchased magazines, followed serialized characters, collected merchandise, and participated in officially sanctioned fan activities were metrics oftentimes for the success of an imprint. However, a doujinshi producer occupied a different position, whereas an author could use a commercially distributed object and transform it, changing one's self into editor, reproducer, distributor, and publisher versus an all encompassing consumer. This transformation was potentially rebellious even when the content itself was not.
A fan did not necessarily need to parody, sexualize, or radically reinterpret an existing character in order to challenge the boundaries of authorship. Simply reproducing a commercially published work independently constituted a redistribution of control. The fan determined what deserved preservation, how it should be assembled, and who should receive it. In such a case, the works produced by Unico Shobō Shinsha therefore occupy an interesting space between devotion and transgression. Their reproduction of Tezuka is an act of reverence: the work is important enough to reproduce, though it not just simultaneously an act of unauthorized appropriation as the publisher had purposefully removed the work from its original commercial context and created a new material object around it.
The post-war Japanese publishing industry developed increasingly sophisticated national distribution networks, but access to particular magazines and publications was not necessarily uniform, especially outside major metropolitan centers. The history of kashihon itself demonstrates how regional distribution networks and localized circulation remained important to manga culture; specialized publishers frequently developed regional rather than genuinely nationwide systems.
The name itself, Unico Shobō Shinsha, is itself suggestive of this history as well. The term shobō (書房), when used in an imprint, evokes a publishing house, one that was 'reorganized' or 'reintroduced' via shinsha. This is precisely where the rebelliousness of the late-Shōwa fan becomes historically interesting. This nature of rebellion can very much be articulated as an explicit statement in the effect that these works belonged to the community and could thus be manipulated.
(Additional printings of Unico from Unico Shobō Shinsha feature obvious color separation printing and oversaturation.)
Contemporary discussions of Japanese fandom frequently treat doujinshi as though it emerged fully formed as a recognizable subculture with standardized conventions. The Unico Shobō Shinsha material complicates that narrative in that it also predates the research doujinshi format or data book. Another important distinction expands these works from being parody, yuri, yaoi, character reinterpretation, or original fan fiction. Before the amateur publisher could become an independent creator, one could first become a reproducer. The act of copying was itself a form of participation.
Seen from the present, the Unico Shobō Shinsha books are also miniature archives of a then disappearing publication culture. Lyrica itself had a relatively brief life. Sanrio discontinued the magazine after its twenty-ninth issue in March 1979, after which the rights to the serialized works were returned to their respective artists. Unico subsequently moved into Shōgaku Ichinensei (First Grader), resuming serialization April 1980 until January 1984, of which none of these works fall into.
The timing of these texts is therefore particularly striking. They emerge during the precise period in which Unico was transitioning between publication contexts, preserving a specific historical state of Unico: the Lyrica version as encountered by its contemporary shoujo readers. The mystery of this circle, while many questions remain, offers us an eye into a world where history, actively in such a case, was compiled for the sake of longevity. Fans as archivists clearly persisted beyond their breadth of experience, jumped hurdles, and have now been re-introduced via one small, dusty box - to that, of which, we are all very thankful for.
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