This week's scan is another issue of Picturegoer magazine, this time from October 17th 1953.


My favourite items are the adverts. "It was our first meeting since leaving school," begins one for Cutex nail varnish, "six sophisticated career girls - or so I thought, until I found out I was the only one without coloured nails!" Shocking. Page 22 has an ad for something which should be brought back immediately, the Cadbury's Milk Tray Block. It's a selection of six different Milk Tray chocs in a bar. How cool is that!?


Click HERE to read the magazine as a PDF, or click below to read in magazine format via Yumpu.



Finally, learn how to apply your face powder with Max Factor -

December 17th 1949 issue of Picturegoer, initially a monthly magazine between 1921 and 1925 before returning as a weekly in 1931. The best bits of this issue are ideas for accessorising your Christmas party dress (page 19), and the letters page (page 3) featuring a letter from across the pond asking, 'Why do English film companies let American distributors of their pictures put out such trashy and misleading advertising material? Take The Blue Lagoon, for instance. This charming picture was advertised by sexy posters which gave the moviegoer the idea that he would see a semi-obscene saga of illicit love.'

There is also a great article on 'What Price Glamour?' (page 9). The writer argues that Hollywood has seen 'a significant shift from the synthetic to the real'. Gone are the synthetic blonde bombshells of the Jean Harlow variety, and in their place are stars who, Picturegoer claims, wear hardly any make-up at all like Olivia de Havilland, Ingrid Bergman and Joan Fontaine. 'The Hollywood emphasis upon glamour in the old sense is on its way out - and I don't think we will mind.'

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January 22nd 1944 issue of Picturegoer magazine. It was a fortnightly publication at the time, out every other Thursday for the princely sum of 3d. There are features with titles like 'Is Orson Welles a Great Actor?' (not yet, says the staff writer) and 'Do You Regard Robert Young as a Star?' (Yes, he's no longer a carbon copy of Robert Montgomery.)

The films of the issue are Sweet Rosie O'Grady and His Butler's Sister, both light hearted US films which had opened there in October and November, respectively. The most interesting thing in this issue is a short piece on page four about race films, and how they ought to cross the pond to better reflect the diversity of the Empire.

The cover star is Susanna Foster, best known for the 1943 version of Phantom of the Opera.

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Manga Max was a monthly title - a relaunch of Manga Mania - that began in December 1999. It lasted 20 issues before folding in November 2000. There is a post about the magazine's history over at All the Anime:

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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#01. December 1998.
#02. January 1999.
#03. February/March 1999.
#04. March/April 1999.
#05. May 1999.
#06. June 1996.
#07. July 1999.
#08. August 1999.
#09. September 1999.
#10. October 1999.
#11. November 1999.
#12. December 1999.
#13. January 2000.
#14. February 2000.
#15. March 2000.
#16. April 2000.
#17. May 2000. Partial scan available at xbomber.
#18. July 2000.
#19. August 2000.
#20. October/November 2000.