Rae wrote:

Wow. Newtype USA was a pretty impressive mag. I didn't really read it a lot though since it was just too pricey for my budget. They don't really explain why they're stopping it though. The only issue I own is the very first premiere issue.

You might just have stumbled on the answer right there, too pricy.

Anthiena wrote:

"...we can say that it had nothing to do with the magazine we produced, its pricing or its performance. Considering the number of hoops that were set before us each month, we made our way through each one and generated the best magazine we could." -Newtype

I'm thinking Management issues, actually.

It might aso have also been a licensing/cost of licensing issue with the name "Newtype."

I've no doubt bad management and about ten trillion other factors were at play here, but I kinda wonder if this isn't part of a larger problem. I think when anime 'exploded' in the US, the company presence actually outstripped the fan presence. For one thing, a lot of what fueled anime was the underground culture of it and I think it lost something when it was popularized. For another, the difficulty in obtaining anime meant a much more selective group of works got stateside. Now just about everything gets brought over if they think they'll possibly be in the green releasing it, so the market is saturated. That or anime just isn't as good these days. I wonder about that, also. Or maybe I'm old and crotchety waving my cane and being like BACK IN MY DAY WE BEGGED FOR FANSUBS OF FLAME OF RECCA AND WERE HAPPY TO GET THEM. When the fans decided so explicitly what anime was available, I think we did better. (This is still the case except now fansub groups are so popular that there's no selectivity.)

The internet wrote:

The quality of anime is going downhill.

From my perspective it's looking more and more like that's a percentage issue. We just had a bigger pool of back anime to draw from in, say, late 80's-2000 than we do now.  I've always tried my damndest to see anime as a medium just like anything else, with good and bad aspects... and out of curiosity a few months ago and checked the original Japanese airing times of series I thought were amazing/entertaining. What I've discovered is that while the stuff I really enjoyed was released at about the same frequency as it is now, I -felt- like more anime was enjoyable back in the day because in the late 90's I was experiencing all the gems of the last few decades over a span of two years. I'm pretty sure I got to see Utena and Eva within a few weeks of eachother. This isn't going to happen on the sub scene today because episodes get subbed within days/hours of airing and if I were watching them in real time 10 years ago it would've become apparent that they were released two years apart.

I'm pretty happy about the direction things are going in, though. A lot of my favourite releases are smaller series that I couldn't exactly count on to wander my way 10 years ago, so while a lot of crap gets to come through the sub gates these days a lot of small cult favourites get to be discovered as well. Hell, SKU isn't your typical big product either, and if it wasn't for the BSSM connection it probably would've never gotten the following it developed. I know a lot of you didn't like BSSM, but I'd seriously be surprised if BSSM (or something with equal popularity that shared staff with Utena) didn't have something to do with you eventually discovering it.

And about the actual death of Newtype. I'm willing to bet it wasn't selling as well as it was expected. Here's the thing. Anime kind of has a dual-culture right now in the first place. From what I've seen, the fansub scene seems to be an entirely different community than the people buying the big name English releases. I have a couple 13ish year old girls in my immediate family that are the very picture of that Sasuke fangirl, and Japanese (geek) culture isn't exactly an interest of theirs yet. NTUSA probably put a lot of weight on name recognition, and to this particular crowd they're just another anime magazine at Boarders. The weeaboos who really obsess over 2ch and know what Newtype is (and probably have scans of it back to the 80's) aren't all that accepting of the English anime industry and are more likely to hear their news through the grapevine than to go out and buy an English publication.

Oh man. That's a longish post for someone who "doesn't care about anime" Wowie. Piq actually looks MORE interesting to me. I mean, not 40bux worth of interesting, but if I saw a copy of that and NTUSA in a dentist's office I'd probably go for the former.