If ever there was an article that should have been written for Zimmerit years ago, it’s one about Bandai’s revered enthusiast division and hobby magazine, B-Club. With the backing of the company that quite literally started the gunpla boom in the early ‘80s, B-Club was a two-pronged assault on older modelers and artists that were no longer satisfied with off-the-shelf plastic kits designed for kids. With a heavy focus on reader submissions, new artists, and plenty of garage kits, B-Club targeted older anime fans and modelers in the heady days of early OVAs and primitive garage kits.
A NEW TYPE OF HOBBY MAGAZINE
When Bandai shipped their Mobile Suit Gundam model kits to stores in 1980, it kicked off a model kit and robot anime boom that hasn’t been matched since. Model kit and toy manufacturers poured money into new anime series featuring robots in an attempt to match the success of the original Gundam. Within five years, the flood of new shows and models subsided, companies shut down or pivoted to new markets, and Bandai was left as the last major contender on the anime plamodel scene.
With a market increasingly saturated and fans growing older and pursuing new interests, B-Club was Bandai’s best way to target the enthusiasts who were created by the gunpla boom and subsequent real robot revolution, but getting a bit older. Early issues focused heavily on the latest Bandai video and TV projects, with model coverage that featured reader submissions of scratch-built or heavily modified off-the-shelf kits.
When interviewed in the Garage Kit Guide ’85-’861, B-Club’s chief editor Satoshi Kato described it as “a new type of model magazine that the readers participate in and [help] create.” Indeed, much of the early spin for the magazine seemed to focus around its reader-driven focus and the potential for young creators to get involved, with offers to pay fans to contribute with model kit reviews, illustrations, and comics.
The origins of the magazine, and B-Club itself, were apparently rooted in Kato’s frustration with the bureaucracy of a large company like Bandai. In that same interview, he explained:
“Well, Bandai is a pretty large company. You might have an idea for a project, but it has to go through the filter of managing directors, the board of directors, and so on. By the time it gets through all that, the project is deadlocked. It makes it hard to even understand what projects you really want to do. I used this experience, doing trial-and-error tests to see if I could somehow get feedback from the actual readership, and that ended up connecting to B-Club’s creation.”
In retrospect it’s hard not to view Kato’s words with a bit of skepticism, as he was clearly a person of some importance at a large corporation going, “Hey! We care what you think! Be a part of this!” but this shift towards new creative endeavors and an older demographic wasn’t confined to just B-Club, as Bandai broadly seemed to be adapting to a change in fan demographics with a then-newfound focus on funding OVA projects like Dallos and prestige films like Royal Space Force.
DUAL MAGAZINE
During the gunpla boom, Bandai’s biggest competitor was toy manufacturer Takara, a company that sponsored plenty of noteworthy mecha shows like Fang of the Sun Dougram and Armored Trooper VOTOMS. In June of ’82, they launched Dual Magazine, an enthusiast hobby magazine for everything Takara sponsored. With covers graced by Crusher Joe, Dougram, VOTOMS, and other projects that Takara manufactured model kits based on, Dual Magazine featured detailed dioramas, extensive line art and background information, and quite a few tabletop simulation games. However, after just 12 issues, Takara pulled the plug on Dual in 1985, right around the time it was pulling back on TV sponsorships. While never a direct competitor to B-Club, it’s hard to argue that Dual didn’t establish much of the format that B-Club’s magazine followed when it launched — the very same year Dual shut down.
Part of this, too, was clearly driven by dwindling demand for robot model kits as the gunpla boom deflated, thanks in large part to over-saturation and that juggernaut of ‘80s kid pastimes, the Nintendo Famicom. For example, alongside early resin garage kits, some of the earliest B-Club kits released augmented or improved existing Bandai plastic kits. In his interview, Kato specifically mentions add-ons for Heavy Metal L-Gaim and Zeta Gundam kits, but the B-Club “upgrade” kit to improve or change an existing kit was something that would continue throughout the division’s existence and even carry on after the division itself shut down. By encouraging fans to customize their kits, purchase resin add-on parts, or just create their own models themselves, Bandai could ensure that they stayed in the model community and could still be approached as potential customers in the future. And indeed, as B-Club ramped up in the years that followed, an increasing amount of original resin kits were sold by B-Club, offering a greater degree of detail, complexity, and variety of subject matter than you’d find in regular plamodel kits.
In that same interview, Kato went on to mention B-Club’s decision to sell products “that don’t use molds,” a confusing selling point until you consider the lead time and cost of injection model kits. Plastic model kits, as you’d get from Bandai or Tamiya, are injection molded using expensive steel molds that take lots of prep work and require a bit upfront cost. The advantage of garage kits, specifically resin kits, is that they’re cast using silicone molds rather than metal molds. The trade-off of flexibility and ease of creation is offset by the poor durability of silicone, which quickly deteriorates as it’s used. In other words, Kato was suggesting that focusing on resin kits would allow B-Club to have more flexibility; to turn out a new kit in less time, or pivot to cater towards fan interest. Given the limited lifespan of a silicone mold, it’s hard not to wonder how well this strategy played out at scale. Yoshihisa Abe, President of Wave Co. Ltd, has said in interviews that the reason his company switched their Five Star Stories kits over from resin to injection-molded plastic was that the demand was so great they couldn’t keep up with the cost and time needed to continually create new molds.
The full interview with B-Club’s Satoshi Kato is available translated on the Zimmerit Patreon
It’s worth mentioning that B-Club’s garage kit offerings almost entirely avoided soft vinyl kits in favor of resin and it may have because of this “no mold” strategy espoused by Kato. Soft vinyl kits, like injection-molded plastic kits, require metal molds. The wonderfully expressive 1/75 scale Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket soft vinyl kits sold by B-Club were actually sculpted by Millennium Model, a garage kit company that had released a number of soft vinyl kits based on ARTMIC OVAs, and produced in partnership with a company called Build Up. That same B-Club/Build Up partnership also worked together on a line of soft vinyl Patlabor kits. A contemporary soft vinyl Power Armor kit based on the 1988 OVA Starship Troopers (an OVA produced by Sunrise and Bandai Visual, to be clear) was sold with normal Bandai branding—no B-Club logos in sight.
While B-Club’s aversion to soft vinyl remains inscrutable decades later, it’s worth mentioning that in the early ‘90s B-Club would reissue soft vinyl Ultraman toys originally sold by Marusan and Bullmark in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
FALSE START IN THE PARKING AREA
The earliest issues of B-Club remain a bit puzzling. The first two issues were published on that same day, November 15th, 1985, but were wildly different aside from some similar branding.
The first issue of B-Club was subtitled “Parking Area” and featured an illustration of a motorcycle on the cover, sold for 980 yen, and did not feature a single reference to anime, giant robots, or gunpla. Instead, the content was exclusively focused on Bandai’s automotive kits (as evidenced by the issue’s subtitle), contained minimal writing, and was mostly composed of photos of model kits and art from model kit boxes. Compared to later issues of B-Club, it’s unusual not just in terms of its contents but in how austere it feels; more like a book than a magazine.
FRESH! BRAIN
Published the same month as the first two issues of B-Club, the mook MJ Material 9 “Fresh! Brain” featured an extensive array of amateur artists with original mechanical designs and manga. A testament to both the quality of amateur illustrators in the mid-’80s and the unique way Studio Nue, ARTMIC, and Okawara design elements combined in the subconscious of fans, Fresh! Brain seemed to be a test run for at least one element of the B-Club formula. Perhaps not coincidentally, Kato also edited this mook, and in his note from the editor at the back of the issue, he encouraged artists to submit their work to B-Club.
On the other hand, the second issue of B-Club featured Blue Comet SPT Layzner on the cover, retailed for 480 yen, and featured plenty of anime, giant robots, gunpla, and scratch-built content. B-Club’s resin kit operation didn’t seem to be at full force quite yet, and the single B-Club product covered in the issue was the resin Ballute Pack add-on for Zeta Gundam kits. In terms of content and focus, this early issue was much like the issues that came later; the first few color pages of the magazine were used for “glamor shots” of the featured kits, while build details and step-by-step photos were provided in the later black and white pages.
With an extensive focus on scratch-built kits and how-to guides for modifying Zeta Gundam plastic kits, the content of this early issue isn’t much different than the contemporaneous Universal Century 0087 doujin we covered a few years ago. From issue two onwards there’s also an uncanny resemblance to Bandai’s Mokei Jyouhou magazine, usually called “Bandai Model Making Journal” in English, a long-running mostly-color publication sold at hobby shops for around 100 yen. Like B-Club, Mokei Jyouhou served as a sort of house organ for Bandai by highlighting new products and animation projects and publishing photos of kits sent in by readers. Mokei Jyouhou actually predated B-Club by quite a few years as it was first published in the late ‘70s as a pamphlet-sized magazine, similar to the contemporary Tamiya News and later model kit pamphlets that were commonplace in the early ‘80s.2
The confusion regarding the differences between these first two issues was apparently widespread, as it’s mentioned in the “Editor’s Room” section of both the second and third issues, although there’s no explanation as to the reason behind the differences.
The second issue of B-Club very much set the template for the magazine that followed, both in terms of design and content. However, the answer to the mystery of that first conspicuous issue might be found in the fact that B-Club magazine wasn’t actually a magazine, but a regularly-published mook3. Without a proper magazine code for it, B-Club wasn’t technically a magazine at all. If I had to warrant a guess, I’d suggest that early on B-Club might have been envisioned as a mook with a single-issue focus; every issue intended to cover a specific topic and nothing else, similar to the Mokei Jyouhou MJ Material mook series. Complicating this hypothesis is the fact that both of these issues were published on the same day.
B-CLUB ORIGINAL GOODS AND THE MEDIA-MIX
The first few years of B-Club saw the magazine cover a wide variety of Bandai-related media: everything from Bandai’s first big feature film, Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise, the Sukeban Deka live-action TV shows, Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ, and the onslaught of Bandai-sponsored or affiliated OVAs, like Appleseed, Mobile Police Patlabor, and various ARTMIC projects. Oddities like the toy line without a cartoon, Spiral Zone, also made a regular appearance, including a fantasy photo novel using the figures produced by Kow Yokoyama. In retrospect, B-Club’s creation in 1985 was positively serendipitous considering the magazine’s focus for the years that followed. 1985 saw both the release of Megazone 23, the spark that ignited the late ’80s OVA boom, and the very first Wonder Festival in Tokyo, the first large-scale garage kit event held in Japan.
Early garage kit subjects were overwhelmingly tilted towards figures and sci-fi monsters, likely in part because of the bounty of options for mecha-heads via plamodel kits during the gunpla boom. The earliest Wonder Festival events featured kit offerings that were largely devoid of mecha subjects, but with the collapse of the gunpla boom, the rise of OVAs, and B-Club itself, the garage kit landscape soon saw a lot more mecha garage kits on offer.
Moving beyond simple upgrade kits, B-Club’s garage kit offerings ranged from OVA and manga-based subjects, like Appleseed, Bio-Booster Armor Guyver, and Bubblegum Crisis, to the ubiquitous Gundam franchise. Branded as “B-Club Original Goods” or “New Cast Models,” these early kits included 1/12 and 1/6 scale figures of character like Lynn Minmay, Fa Yuiry, and Deunan Knute. Appleseed, Black Magic M-66, Sukeban Deka, and Dragonar were well-supported by B-Club’s early resin offerings, although the company also dabbled in un-branded kits, like their line of naked figures (designed, ostensibly, for customization into other characters) called simply, “The Nude.”
B-CLUB FACE
Easily B-Club’s strangest regular feature, “Face” was a small interview at the back of early issues with up-and-coming or outright aspirational actresses, in a partnership with JAC, a recruiting company. Often these women would be photographed with a Gundam model kit or issue of B-Club to accompany their short interview, or in this case with Nao Morimizu, styling a limited edition B-Club training jacket given out via a lottery to fans who submitted work to the magazine.
In early issues of B-Club, this same lineup was reflected in the features and stories in the magazine. Masamune Shirow’s manga, specifically Appleseed and Black Magic, appeared extensively in the magazine prior to their adaption as OVAs produced by Bandai Visual. Beginning in issue 18, a regular feature called “Bubble Gum World” appeared providing behind-the-scenes sketches and teases of the next Bubblegum Crisis episode. By issue 24, this had expanded to include a section called the “YOU•MIC Information Corner” to cover other OVAs produced by Youmex/ARTMIC partnership, while Bandai’s own Emotion label received a similar section around the same time called “Emotion Presents Robot Club” to cover their OVA projects. These sections would later be combined and expanded on as proper books, produced under the label of “B-Club Specials” and as such formed a prime example of a media mix strategy, with an axis of OVAs, garage kits, and printed material.
Another prime example of this media saturation was the aforementioned Appleseed, which received coverage in B-Club while still just a manga, with content as disparate as an interview with Masamune Shirow and step-by-step instructions on how to create a stuffed Briareos doll Deunan holds in one scene. The decidedly average Appleseed OVA, animated by the upstart studio Gainax that had just finished production on Royal Space Force, was accompanied by a short live-action promo film featuring an impressive Briareos costume and a jeep borrowed from manga artist Suezen. But before that promo film or the OVA was seen by fans, the impressive 1/1 scale Briareos mask appeared on the cover of issue 23. Designed by Fuyuki Shinada, multi-page coverage of the scratch-built prop paved the way for a behind-the-scenes feature in issue 28, published a month before the Appleseed Special Prologue VHS tape hit stores to drum up hype for the forthcoming OVA.
This coverage was, of course, accompanied by a series of Appleseed kits. Although positively rudimentary by today’s standards, the Silence of Gaia series was notable for having eye-catching box art featuring manga panels plastered on all sides, in an era when most garage kits came in plain boxes with simple labels. Of course, the kits themselves haven’t aged quite as well, consisting of few parts and featuring minimal detail.
What makes the early efforts to promote manga, OVAs, and live-action shows even more fascinating is that there was, of course, an elephant in the room. Bandai’s biggest franchise and one that would become a major focus for B-Club in the years that followed.
THE INEVITABLE G
In the late ‘80s, Gundam was rapidly heading towards mass saturation, with Gundam ZZ, Char’s Counterattack, and War in the Pocket released in rapid succession alongside heaps of spin-offs. B-Club was there to offer up plenty of resin kits based on the most popular mecha series around and offer plenty of coverage in its magazine. That’s not to say Gundam wasn’t properly covered by B-Club prior to this build-up—both Zeta Gundam and Gundam ZZ were featured extensively during their TV runs—but Gundam as a multi-media juggernaut really took off in the late ‘80s, and B-Club was there to support it.
With each new Gundam series or spin-off came new garage kits to supplement the regular gunpla released by Bandai. B-Club’s offerings ranged from the small 1/220 scale kits based on Kazuhisa Kondo’s Revival of Zeon manga (which ran in the pages of B-Club magazine, naturally) to the aforementioned 1/75 soft vinyl kits based on the designs of Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket and utterly massive resin 1/35 scale RX-78 Ver. Ka.
As Gundam became increasingly ubiquitous in both the pages of B-Club and everywhere else, the division’s priorities seemed to shift a bit. With the collapse of the Japanese economic bubble in the early ‘90s and the contracting OVA marketplace4, B-Club became less about elevating Bandai media mix initiatives or catering to hardcore fans and more about supplementing major Bandai projects, which usually meant Gundam but as the decade went on, also meant series like Zeiram, Macross, Sailor Moon, or the Super Sentai series du jour.
The magazine changed during this time, too. Eschewing the more hardcore model kit focus of the first fifty or so issues, by the time B-Club hit the 100 issue mark it had more in common with glossy color anime magazines like Newtype or Animage than it did with Model Graphix or Hobby Japan. It wasn’t just the focus on major franchises and stricter anime content that really changed the feel, but by the early ‘90s, the magazine had all but shed any sense of DIY, fan-driven content and became decidedly less exciting as a result. Early issues were fascinating because of the variety of the content and the fact that despite being a Bandai promotional magazine, it didn’t always feel like a Bandai promotional magazine. The latter two-thirds of the magazine’s run felt very much like a never-ending heap of promotional material shoveled onto the reader.
B-CLUB THE PLASTIC
A short-lived B-Club spinoff magazine, B-Club The Plastic, first published in July of 1992 to promote Formula 91 model kits. Heftier than a typical issue of B-Club and with a focus exclusively on models (hence the name), B-Club The Plastic seemed to be angling for a Hobby Japan EX-esque style quarterly publication, but in the end, only lasted a couple of issues. The second issue was published in October of ’92 with a heavy focus on the Bandai-sponsored JAF-CON garage kit convention.
An undated sales brochure for advertisers dating to the magazine’s run in the early ‘90s described the magazine as “a cult magazine pursuing entertainment,” with that keyword entertainment reflecting the switch to a greater focus on anime, movies, idols, and film. This pivot to a broader entertainment focus was evident in the brochure’s breakdown of recent cover stories, including #82’s “Beautiful Girls Fighting,” #86’s “Encyclopedia of Heroine Uniforms,” and #87’s “History of Giant Robot Design.” These broad media surveys were, of course, quite different than the early issues which often relied on custom model kits for the cover features or in the case of the aforementioned #23, a custom Briareos head mask. Further information for advertisers drove home the newfound media focus even more, with pie graphs illustrating reader demographics in terms of things like the kind of home media players they owned or their favored genre of software.
In short, whatever sort of corporate sting-pulling Kato had done in the mid-’80s to slide an amateur-focused hobby division through a massive company only lasted for so long, as it too succumbed to the big red machine.
There is, of course, one more story to drive this point home and it concerns the fan-driven history of garage kit conventions in Japan. Wonder Festival, a biannual event first held in 1984, was the defacto major marketplace of garage kits (and still is!), with a unique “one-day sales” agreement that allows small manufacturers and amateur casters an opportunity to sell legal, licensed garage kits based on big properties. Originally started by General Products, Wonder Festival is now run by Kaiyodo and while it was never the only garage kit convention out there, it was certainly the biggest and arguably the most important.
The one-day sales agreement facilitated by Wonder Festival is unique, not just when you consider the number of unlicensed garage kits produced overseas and the incorrect assumption all garage kits are unlicensed, but because it facilitated an environment that allowed fans to create kits based on the series they love without the threat of legal action. A similar situation allowed doujinshi to thrive via Comiket, but in the case of Wonder Festival, allowed a lot of smaller shops or groups to turn their passion into an actual company.
In the early days of B-Club, Bandai (or at least B-Club) supported Wonder Festival both by having a booth at events and by covering it in the magazine. Something changed around 1990, though, when Bandai and B-Club launched what has now been dubbed the “Anti-WonFes Campaign” that saw Bandai refuse to grant any licenses for Gundam product at Wonder Festival. According to reminiscences online, this created an awkward situation for a year or two, when licensed garage kits would be sold next to unlicensed kits clearly based on Gundam or other Bandai properties — something unthinkable today.
Perhaps by 1990, B-Club had gotten big enough that Bandai no longer saw the value in licensing their prized franchise to the little guys (though they certainly had no problems licensing to bigger garage kit companies like Kotobukiya), or perhaps, they just wanted in on the event itself. Wonder Festival was, after all, run by a competing garage kit company.
In 1992, things became a bit more clear in regards to Bandai’s intentions, as that year saw it team up with magazine Hobby Japan to organize JAF-CON (Japan Fantastic Convention), which continued to run through the ‘90s until it gave way to C3xHobby in 2004, which is currently the only hobby event that grants one-day licenses for Gundam kits.
THE END… SORT OF
B-Club magazine ceased publication in 1998 with issue #148, featuring the head of a shiny, computer-rendered RX-78 gracing the final cover. The magazine’s staff went on to start the magazine Dengeki Hobby and Bandai’s enthusiast publishing responsibilities were taken up by the company’s Media Works division. The B-Club shop in Shibuya had closed a year earlier, in 1997. Despite the closure, the B-Club brand was not totally gone — it continued to pop up on official upgrade or conversion kits produced by Bandai for the Master Grade line and, occasionally, on other Gundam products, like figures. For a time the brand was managed by Bandai’s toy subsidiary Popy, which had at one point been a major competitor to Gundam’s original toy sponsor, Clover. Upgrade or conversion kits from the early 2000s would often have the Popy logo on the box, but the classic B-Club logo on the instructions.
It isn’t particularly difficult to see why Bandai shut down B-Club; the market was moving towards high-end gunpla releases like the High Grade and Master Grade kits, the post-Evangelion garage kit boom was focused mostly on figures, and the late ‘90s saw an explosion of collectors toys and figures that likely sucked even more air out of the sails of garage kit manufacturers. The decade had also been rough for garage kit manufacturers across the board, with the most successful of the bunch (Kotobukiya, Kaiyodo, Wave, Max Factory, etc) either pivoting to collector toys and figures or jumping over to injection-plastic kits. Garage kits would still exist, but they were becoming even more niche despite the mainstream focus on otaku culture after Evangelion. In other words, garage kits were going back to the fans and Bandai had bigger things to focus on.
Bandai’s approach to gunpla in the ‘90s also worked against B-Club’s hardcore enthusiast models. With the Master Grade line and later High Grade UC series, gunpla no longer needed to be tied to a current TV show or OVA. If there was demand for an obscure variation or unique mobile suit, Bandai could just release it as a normal kit, or today, just release it as a Bandai Premium kit and annoy the shit out of fans everywhere.
The legacy of B-Club is that it marked a turning point for big corporations taking a long hard look at fan culture and realizing they could monetize the hell out of it, at least in regards to fan culture surrounding plamo. As otaku culture, or at least otaku interests, became increasingly mainstream in the ‘90s and beyond, the need for a marketing division like B-Club disappeared entirely. Niche sub-culture had become mass-market pop culture.
Additional Reading
- Anime Archaeology: Shibuya’s B-Club Shop
- The 1/220 Scale Gundam Garage Kits of Kazuhisa Kondo and Makoto Kobayashi
- The Resin Punks Never Left
- B-Club’s Galactic War Record, 1990-91
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Notes
- A small, digest-sized self-published book sold by General Products that detailed the addresses and specialties of dozens of model kit shops around Japan.
- During the gunpla boom, a lot of these small pamphlet-sized “handbooks” popped up in Japanese hobby shops, serving as not just advertisements for new kits but also offering up background info and art from the TV shows these kits came from. Takara had a series called 3D Hobby. Bandai promoted their then-new Gundam spin-off model kit line with the Mobile Suit Variation Handbook. Imai and ARII, two-thirds of the model kit consortium that sponsored Super Dimension Fortress Macross, published the Magazine for Anime and Hobby Fan that began with an exclusive focus on Macross but later expanded to cover Super Dimension Century Orguss, too.
- A commonly used Japanese portmanteau of “book” and “magazine” used to signify a publication less ephemeral than a magazine but not quite as sizable as a book.
- A contraction that was the result of electronics manufacturers and record labels tightening their belts a bit due to the new economic situation, resulting in a heap of new OVAs based on existing, recognizable properties and little in the way of original titles.