Titan relaunched the magazine yet again in 1998, in a new format as Manga Max, with new editor Jonathan Clements. “I’d been writing and translating for the magazine under Cefn, and sub-editing for Helen during her tenure,” Clements recalls. “Both of them, it later turned out, had recommended me on their way out the door, but Titan took their sweet time offering me the job. Years later, I got to see the personnel report on my interview, which read: ‘Have reservations about his attitude, but definitely knows his stuff.’ That will probably be on my tombstone.” It was a big step-up in production quality, now an oversized, glossy full-colour title. The UK’s anime industry was not at its peak at this time, and MM reacted by having a more international focus. Much of the coverage and reviews were now given over to US releases.
“Titan wanted it to serve the entire English-speaking world, so I was encouraged to run articles on things when they appeared in the US or UK,” says Clements. “Unfortunately, this directive came at the end of the period when the UK led the US market in any appreciable way, so it ended up pleasing nobody, with articles about products that many readers stood little chance of affordably (or legally) obtaining.” Conversely, for readers outside the UK, lengthy shipping times meant that by the time the magazine had made its way to the US or Australia, the information inside was months out of date.
The key difference was that Manga Max dropped the serialised manga entirely. “We’d run out of Akira, which was the real motherlode,” explains Clements. “Cramming it with other comics was likely to be an expense, rather than a cost-saving venture. There was talk in initial meetings of running previews of new manga that Titan hoped to get for free. I said that was sure to be an approvals and negotiation nightmare with the Japanese, and I wanted nothing to do with it.” The magazine instead consisted of news, features reviews and columns covering anime and manga, and a smattering of other Japanese and Asian Pop Culture.
“I wanted to hold anime to a higher standard, to write about it in the way that the mainstream press would write about it if we were in an alternative universe where they cared.” Clements says. “I wanted to give people the tools and the vocabulary to talk about anime in a smart way. In a very real sense, that was a deliberate continuation of the project Helen had started with Anime UK.”
Manga Max’s final issue was published in 2000. The latter issues predicted a new era of anime fandom would be born out of the success of Pokémon and Studio Ghibli, but sadly the magazine ceased publishing before it could see the boom happen.
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