Conventional Wisdom

See?  It’s not JUST me buying stuff ‘cos it looks stupid!  It’s also me buying stuff that reminds me of when I was stupid!  No, but seriously, the vendors at this thing were obviously skewed heavily towards western stuff, and for once I DON’T find that a point worth complaining about, since nobody every claimed it would be otherwise.  Still, finding even the briefest trace of late 90s/early 00s anime/manga culture was a lot of fun.  SOOO many companies that don’t exist any more!

And yeah, “USAnime Magazine” didn’t actually exist, I’m doing my whole “making up fictional stand-ins” thing again.  The real life inspiration for this page was a copy of Animerica Extra… so the fiction is pretty thin.  Not as thin as the comics in the first panel, though, where I just gave up on making up things halfway through and filled out the rest of the display with covers for some… less than well-regarded Real Life comics.  Let’s see if anybody can identify these turds!