Science Fiction International: Japan/ Mobile Suit Gundam-Previously Unseen Fantasy Modeling #7 Article

I've recently had the honor and great pleasure to speak with Trash Bash Master Andrew Yanchus about his many articles for Fantasy Modeling Magazine as well as his time at Marvel Comics and Aurora Models. Andy has kindly offered to do an extended interview about his career in the near future, we're just trying to determine the best format for it.

In the meantime he has graciously offered to allow me to post these scans of his final article written for Fantasy Modeling from the legendary and unfortunately, mostly, lost Issue #7. This article, Science Fiction International: Japan delves into the phenomena of Mobile Suit: Gundam models and has to be one of the earliest attempts to cover the hobby of gunpla that Gundam helped to create and quickly took to incredible levels of popularity. At a time when any information about Japanese anime and models was incredibly scant, this article would have been an informative and compelling piece of hobby journalism.

First off it should be clear that this is not a perfect copy of the article but copies of xeroxes of the article. Andy included scans of the color images showing Dave Cockrum's gunpla diorama and these go a long way to showing how cool the final article would have been once published.

The caption explaining Cockrum's diorama is a bit hard to read but basically he conceived of the models as being humans in armored suits and not massive, piloted robots as they are in Gundam. Andy also shared that Cockrum's technique for the vine-like ground cover was to use boiled spaghetti to add texture and then painted it once it was completely dry. Apparently it looked really cool but was also very brittle. So duplicate this technique with caution!

Additional information from Paty Cockrum, Dave's wife:
"Alas, this construction didn't survive the move to SC.

Actually, it did't survive the packing!!! Dave was packing up models for the move, and found that mice had found the spaghetti... chewed it up and he was so disgusted that he threw it into the trash!!!

He swore to never use pasta for special effects again!!!

Pictures are all that is left!"

So enjoy these pages that Andy has shared with us. They're more than likely all we'll ever see of Fantasy Modeling #7. Many thanks to Andy Yanchus for such an excellent gift.