Comic Box 1997 End of Evangelion Issue - Archive Scan & Translation Project
Master Post & Table of Contents
[Link to the full magazine scan]
Comic Box was a magazine in Japan launched in, from what I can gather, 1982. It was a bit of an ‘alt” magazine - it has an imprint, Comic Box Jr, which focused on doujinshi for example - and would cover anything anime-adjacent, including western films. The October 1997 release of the magazine was dedicated to the release of the End of Evangelion film, and to answering the question “what was the phenomenon called Evangelion?”. Towards that end it features fan submissions, art, comics, essays, all talking about what Eva meant to them. Some are serious, some are fully comedic, way way more than I expected are erotic, and overall it is a time capsule of how the anime community was thinking about Evangelion when EoE came out. The magazine dissolved in 1998 from what I can tell, so this was one of its last releases - you can still see its absolutely vintage website here! Complete with dashing chibi cat gif.
I discovered this magazine through japanese anime/manga archivist-in-residence Ehoba on twitter, who provided photos and rough summaries of some of the pages. They are just camera photos of an open magazine though, not scans, and not at all complete. I hunted around for a while to find a scanned version, messaged Ehoba and a few others, posted on forums like Evageeks, and drew total blanks. I couldn’t find any listings of it online, so I set the quest aside...until I was placing another order for some artbooks for import and decide to check Yahoo Auctions Japan and lo and behold, there is was!
So that image above is not one pulled from the internet - I have scanned the entire Evangelion segment of Comic Box - October 1997 issue. You can find it in full on the Internet Archive via the link above, in both pdf and png. I am a neophyte scanner, so happy to recieve advice for this and future projects in the comments.
Next will be translating the pages - I will hopefully make translations available here for each ‘chunk’ and update as I go. Some previews and additional notes are available on my tumblr post on the magazine in the meantime.
To note, I am not a Japanese speaker; this archive is a machine translation combining multiple tools and consultations with Japanese speakers on tricky bits, editing by myself for clarity of meaning and readability. The text is OCR’d using various tools (primarily Google Lens & Capture2Text), and so while I am confident it is 95% correct it is still an OCR of old magazine scans, it will have errors. I welcome notes and feedback from those with more knowledge than me; as I say, I do this not because I am the most qualified, but because no one else will.
Table of Contents