Shin Mazinger - The Blu-ray in detail (I)

With a certain delay, I'll introduce you today the first volume of the new series Blu-ray.
The volume is presented in a sober but elegant box, showing an image of Mazinger on the front and one of Koji on the back, both of them over a scarlet background. What you see on the lower part of the box is the obi, usually attached to Japanese editions, that gives us information on the contents of the product. The box is about the same width of a DVD but a little bit lower (like the individual boxes for Blu-ray) and contains the three discs with the same slevees that will be featured on the DVD edition. It also contains a 32-page booklet, a coupon to gain points at EMOTION FAMILY CLUB (we can later exchange them for other Blu-ray or DVD) and another coupon that we will use to get our hands on the desired Zeus figure, a limited gift with the first edition of this Blu-ray.

If you fully open the full-colored booklet, the cover and backcover show an image of Mazinger's face as you can see in the picture below.


Once inside the booklet, the first two pages show us an interesting comparision between images from the original manga and from the new TV series.

The similitudes are certainly striking, and these homages are without doubt a gift to the older fans, since they hadn't been forced into the series.

In the next entry I will show you more about the booklet and other aspects of this edition.

Mazinger - The manga through time

Still waiting for more specific news on the continuation or not of Shin Mazinger (the web page that I mentioned last week contained only a survey which I guess will serve as a test on people's interest).
To make the wait more bearable, I'll start posting today about some of the shopping that I did while in Japan so you can see some curious items or at least, see them in more detail. I'm going to start with a little book that I mentioned briefly on June 21's post, which dealt with Shin Mazinger ZERO's manga and the magazine where it is being published.

As I already told you, the magazine was accompanied on issue number 8 (on sale in June) by a special booklet with illustrations by the 3 most famous illustrators of the super-robot. It is actually a 130-page book reprinting 3 old stories from the Mazinger saga, each one of them illustrated by Go Nagai, the late Ken Ishikawa and Gosaku Ota respectively.

The story by master Nagai belongs to the Mazinkaiser series and it was already published in a single manga volume dedicated to this robot. In Ishikawa's one, we have the first appeareance of the mechanical monster GARADABURA MK01 and the brain-like warrior organism EBA (which appeared in Shin Mazinger as KEDORA). Finally, Ota illustrates the origin of Dr. Hell in a classic story which was published for the first time in 1974 and that can be found in the manga volumes dedicated to what was known as the TV series adaptation, written by Nagai himself but drawn by the skilled Gosaku Ota.

This is a special volume that does not offer new material, but because of its condition as a special gift, could end up being a pretty sought-after item.

(The images show the cover and backcover of the book)