internet mythology - glass mask and the scanlation archive

In the past, using the Internet was less of an algorithmic game and more of an exploratory process, an excursion into the wilderness of dispersed pleasures. Instead of the same hegemonic content, cloned from one site/screen to the next, eventually, if not originally, commoditised, there were real unique sites of interest but they had to be mined. Sometimes, if the particular gem searched for could not be discovered but the audience existed, as niche at it may have seemed, the audience would become the provider to fill the void.  This audience/creator symbiosis can barely be avoided now, with content-creators saturating our mediums, but without camera-phones, the easy availability of editing software and rampant social media as personal advertising, to embody this role was a far more difficult endeavour that took great commitment and generosity. Fans spent hours finding demos, recording them from old tapes, and uploading them, or they scanned images from books or sometimes even meticulously transcribed old magazine articles that contained titillating fragments. Perhaps if the genre wasn’t flourishing, the articles waning – the fans would begin to produce their own interpretations of these works – but not in search of personal glory, merely to flesh out the gap, to keep the wheels in motion, to continue to live within the utopia. The hunt for these items, organic or internally manufactured, was challenging but the reward worthwhile – scouring the internet for that rare B-side mp3, the negatives that never made the exhibition, a designers fundamental first drafts, became a process of total invigoration, with interests and passions both ignited and given a sense of validity amongst disseminated but admired peers.

My own process was one of meticulous archival. Manga and comic books, first discovered in the local library, became an obsession but at the time publishers were scarce, their releases of the latest volumes far behind their Japanese counterparts and the books far too expensive for a 12 year old whose parents disapproved. Scanlations, or fanlations, where the comics were picked up fresh in Japan, scanned and then translated by eager fans that were kind enough to share them, were free. Despite the supposedly complimentary nature of this content, there was still an arduous task ahead when considering procurement. Sometimes a website would have almost all volumes, apart from one missing, elusive chapter that seemed not to exist anywhere on the net – an unacceptable notion within my alphabetized, genre organised and, importantly, entirely complete desktop archive.  Sometimes the file format was totally alien and could not be downloaded or translated, even with the software that I had begun obtaining for these very such occasions– WinRAR, UnrarX etc. – the tough walnut no clamp could release, frustratingly out of reach. Sometimes, and this was indeed the original cause of my parents disapproval, the websites that hosted these chapters would be absolutely riddled with pornography. In fact, clicking the wrong download link could be easily done due to the absolute conflation of links that would appear at the point of retrievel, most being literal booby traps, many being pernicious viruses, with one true link that must be carefully discerned nestled amongst them, therefore, accidentally downloading porn was not unheard of – and horrified me thoroughly but not enough to put me off the hunt.  Then, there was quality to consider – some chapters so pixelated they had to be read through a squint, some grammar so uncanny that trying to ascertain the narrative became irrelevant and it must instead be taken as some sort of dada-esque poetry. This has led to me now not really finding qualms with low quality images or shoddy typing errors – I’m desensitised to the sticky aesthetic of the low quality bad image - as long as the story existed and could be accessed, I would make it my mission to find it, download it in any way possible and compartmentalise it within my files.  I wish I could find that hard drive.

I recently read an interview with Suzue Miuchi, the author/artist of Glass Mask, a shoujo epic of a monumental scale that I read with absolute fervour, entranced by the old school eye-glittering and the, frankly, utilising perspective, ridiculous levels of drama.  Asked about international fans, Miuchi stated that  “I get a lot of questions from the international media, but I find it hard to answer them because they know about my work through reading a pirated version. It gives me mixed feelings.” [1] Glass Mask was never and has never been released in English – downloading scanlations are the only way to access this work. I was left with a feeling of slight disappointment at this sentiment – at the time, when downloading these works and ingraining them into my cultural understanding and, not to exaggerate, allowing them to influence my personal aesthetic, I definitely didn't feel like a pirate taking advantage but as a discoverer, bypassing the Rosetta stone to gain direct access to the ancient ruins that no one else seemed to notice. I suppose many conquistadors felt that way.

My mission was not unique, nor was it particularly noble, but at the time I felt like some sort of curator, a gatherer of interests with honed methods of procurement and a network of peers, eager to assist. Downloading these items took time, due to our low bandwidth, there was an element of patience and fortitude required which in my opinion is now lacking. There was also an element of subjectivity, of unsupervised or unguided selection; the genres that I hunted were chosen both to influence and to conform to a continuously cultivated sense of personal taste – adventure comics, romance comics, and fantasy comics– never horror. Today, we can have a new book in seconds, an album at a click but this content has been carefully designed for our consumption and deviation from this readily available menu is not permissible. Our easy, HD content is thrust towards us, not shielded tantalisingly beyond our grasps, begging to be found. There is no questing left, as corporations caught on to these literal webs of unadulterated access and monetized them, music discovery catered by Spotify, book recommendations commandeered by amazon, films curated by Netflix – piracy more utilised to download the latest marvel epic than to share and spread niche interests – but even this banality is threatened as criminal. To recreate my archive would cost a lot of money if attempted and I suppose now, as an adult who should not forget about creators the way one can in childish ambivalence, I should pay my dues after years of scrounging badly translated versions of work via an international network of fans. It may even be impossible to complete the archive as it existed, as many of the titles probably no longer have an internet presence, only ghosts of pages and chapter summaries remain, the rest lost to the ether. I know it is wrong but still, again, I wish I could find that hard drive. There was some really good shit in there.

[1] Morrissy, Kim .  “Glass Mask Creator Has Mixed Feelings About English Readers” Anime News Network.com https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2019-01-26/glass-mask-creator-has-mixed-feelings-about-english-readers/.142400 (accessed 20th March 2020)