Issue 6 - July 2015 Jose Sanchez was born and raised in Miami, Florida on March 10,1968,where he still lives today with his wife Aliana. At the age of six, he was introduced to fingerpainting. By first grade, he had picked up his first pencil, but it was not until the summer of 1977 when Star Wars hit the movie screens across America, that his imaginative spark was truly ignited! Like so many other people that were influenced by the cult phenomenon, he was too. So much so, that this led him to seriously explore and develop his talent for creating art further. As time has gone by and he has honed his skills, he has been notably influenced by the works of Science Fiction and Fantasy artists such as: Stephen Youll, Donato Giancola, Chris Moore, Tim White, Jim Burns, David B. Mattingly and Michael Whelan, to name but a few. He attended Lindsey-Hopkins Technical Education Education Center in Miami, Florida where he received a certificate in Commercial Art Technology-majoring in illustration and minoring in Graphic Design. Jose would ideally like to see himself one day working professionally in the motion picture industry as a Concept Artist. He had previously worked on a low- budget SF/Super Hero Animation flick titled: “Shadow Runner”, designing the individual character’s spaceships. “They tend to depend more on technology than they do on their own superpowers”. He is also interested in the publication and gaming markets. To one of his many credits, which have included several fanzine covers and one semi-prozine cover and interior artwork. Also appearing in the official LucasFilm Star Wars Insider magazines: “City Patrol”, was chosen for publication in the March/April 2006/issue #86. “Oil Bath”, “Artoo”, “Pair of Jawas” and “Land of the Rising Suns” in April 2014/issue #148 now being published by Titan Publications and online at starwars.com on the Jan.15,2014 Blog article: Bantha Tracks: Best of the Year, Online edition: “AT-AT Driver” and in the Blog article: Bantha Tracks: Art Galaxy, March 2014 “ Djas Puhr-Settling The Score!” Much of his art can be currently seen at efanzines.com. Breaking It All Down: The ‘Zine – is edited and written by Alexander Case. Letters of Comment can be sent to [email protected]. If you’ve never sent a LoC to me before, please put “LoC:” at the start of the subject line, so it gets filed in the right place. I also sporadically appear on the Bureau42 Greatest Science Fiction Film Tournament podcast, available through the Bureau42 Master Podcast Audio Feed, which can be found on iTunes and Stitcher. My YouTube Channel, where the web-series that this fanzine is spun off from. can be found at http://www. youtube.com/user/CountZeroOr Issue Contents Letters & Issue Note 5 Movie Review – Mad Max: Fury Road 7 Fanzine Report – Royal Space Force 25th Anniversary Fanzine 9 Anime 202: Shows with Prerequisites – Madoka Magica 10 Video Game Primer: Shin Megami Tensei – Part 2 15 Letters & Issue Note Before I get started with the letters, I do need to make a little apology for the delay in this issue. The short version is that I was busy with getting my Senior Project together for my bachelor’s degree... followed by getting my Bachelor’s degree. Specifically, I now have a Bachelor’s of Science in Information Technology – Health Informatics. This does now mean that I have more time available to work on fanzines – even once I’ve gotten my post-graduation job, the job will (hopefully) not require me to bring work home with me to work on off the clock. Also, all of the SF books I’ve been reading lately have been for the Hugo Awards, as I’m attending Sasquan, so I don’t exactly feel comfortable reviewing them for this ‘zine, as I don’t exactly want to give away how I’m going to vote until after I’ve voted. So, this is going to be a little more of a Anime & Video Game focused issue than the last few. So, I apologize for all of that in advance. Now, with that out of the way, I’ve got a letter from Lloyd Penny! Me at my graduation - Photograph by Rose Case Dear Alexander: Many thanks for issue 5 of Breaking It All Down - The Zine. Now to see if I can create another letter of comment for you. Bits of time present themselves, and this might take all day. I understand why Jerry Kaufman might wonder about the characters that were cosplayed. I didn’t recognize most of the characters myself. That’s what I get for not watching anime. This past weekend, we were vendors at a local anime/ gaming/cosplay convention, and it was the same there, I saw lots of costumes and cosplay, but didn’t know where the characters were from. We might need that information here. That convention was called Frostcon, and like Kumoricon, it was difficult to find food nearby. Frostcon was in downtown Toronto at the big Sheraton there, and there is a underground shopping pathway with assorted food courts every block or so, but it was still difficult to find a decent lunch. The Subway sub shop had a forty-foot line-up in front of it any time I looked, so lunch was from the local noodle shop, which was a welcome change. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the idea of a dealer’s room in another hotel. To the best of my knowledge, Toronto used to be a major hub for English dubbing of anime shows. The original Sailor Moon was dubbed here. I wish I could find more voice work like this here, and audition for it. Time to fold, and fire it off to you. Make a few more of these, okay? See you then. Yours, Lloyd Penney. Thanks for the letter, Lloyd! I love getting each letter from you. Currently, from what I understand, the main hubs of voice acting in North America are LA (with Bang Zoom Entertainment) and Houston Texas (where Sentai Filmworks does their dubbing). From what I understand, part of the reason why a lot of the dubbing was done in Canada back in the day was, in part, to get around SAG rules – often some these anime studios simply couldn’t afford to pay SAG rates for the actors, so by operating in Canada, and having the actors act under a psudonym, they could get around some of those rules. Things have changed considerably since then. Not only is there enough money in the business now that some anime distributors can afford to pay SAG rates, but voice actors from the English dub have started to develop their own fan following as well, so it behooves actors to use their own name over a pseudonym. Kumoricon is the only con I’ve attended where the dealer’s room has been separate from the main event hotel. Normally, when a con outgrows one hotel, it finds a larger space. That said, I understand the decision. For a couple years, Kumoricon was located at the Portland Hilton Tower (which – if you’ve been to downtown Portland – is about a block from the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall). That location was, frankly, something of a hot mess. The hotel itself was a very nice place, but... well, the internal flow of the building – from the width of corridors to the stairway down to the ballroom level – was absolutely wrong for an anime convention. There were just too many choke-points in the hotel, and it felt like there was a running fight between the con staff and the hotel to find ways for people to get access to the dealer’s room and the game rooms. Indeed, there was a chunk of the first day where the dealer’s room had been closed by the hotel, and the con had to scramble to find a new route to give people access to the room. While the hotel had a park adjacent to it, due to the wind tunnel effect of Portland’s streets, it was kind of cold and dark, so attendees were more likely to congregate around the hotel, and the streets around the hotel, instead of cosplayers (and cosplay photo shoots) more organically spilling out into the park. Probably the Lloyd Center Hilton (where Orycon has historically been held) might have been a better fit. Moving back to the two-hotel thing, I think the reason why it’s working for Kumoricon and not as much for other hotels, is because of geography and time of year – Labor day weekend in Vancouver Washington is nice enough that it makes the walk between the two hotels pleasant, combined with the second hotel being on the Colombia, making it a nice place to stay and generally hang out. Finally, on the cosplay front – if you come across someone cosplaying as a character you don’t recognize, please feel free (with the cosplayer’s permission of course), to take a picture and send it to me – and I’ll happily identify the show. Heck, I could probably get a column out of that. Movie Review – Mad Max: Fury Road The Mad Max films are movies that have historically been better known for their action and world-building than their narrative depth. In the first film we saw a world on the brink of destruction, where society was about to fall, and was desperately hanging on to the vest ages of society and civilization by their fingernails, in the hopes that maybe, maybe it could claw its way back over the top of the cliff, though it knew in its heart of hearts that the fall was inevitable.