Josh’s Anime Blog

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Today I opened my mailbox and saw that I had received my first issue of PiQ, which I am getting since I had been subscribed to NewType USA. Having glanced through the magazine, there seems to be several good things and several bad things about it at first glance:

Good:

1. It still seems to be mostly about East Asian Culture, though I won’t say that it is an overwhelmingly “mostly.” Maybe 60% of the magazine or so

2. Anime reviews still looked like the old NewType style to me, which was nice in that at least it had a feeling of familiarity to it.

3. They did keep the manga insert

Bad

1. Things didn’t seem to be grouped together like they were in NewType. In NewType, you would start off with the anime section, then move into the manga section, and then into the gaming section. However, it seemed to me in PiQ, things were just kind of splattered all over the place. If you wanted to find all the anime stuff, you had to go through the whole thing.

2. While as I noted above, most of the magazine still dealt with anime and manga, it took me until page 17 for me to actually run into any of it that wasn’t an ad. Meaning they probably front-loaded a lot of there non-anime stuff up front to attract those who may not look at an anime magazine, but then halfway through, the magazine goes into full anime and manga mode. It partly felt like, to me, that they took their old magazine and peppered some non-anime things through it to make it took more “mainstream” but that it was still, at it’s core, and anime and manga magazine. Not that that fact may be seen as something bad, but by do something if it’s half-assed? If you wanted to make an anime magazine, then make an anime magazine.

3. It’s quite a bit thinner than even I expected. Maybe it’s just the paper being used, though for half the price, I probably shouldn’t complain too much.

4. Unfortunately the manga insert stopped being Kobato, much to my distress.

Overall, I would probably rate PiQ overall pretty good given it’s price. I realize the point of throwing in things about the Terminator TV series and Avatar into the magazine, but frankly, having my anime reading interrupted by Battlestar Galactica was somewhat annoying.

I’ll still have to think about whether I want to resubscribe once my subscription is up, but I thought that the transition from NewType over to PiQ could have been a lot worse.

Update:

I thought I would add to the main post a comment by someone from PiQ in response to my post, and my response to their comment:

First, their comment:

“If you wanted to make an anime magazine, then make an anime magazine.”

Funny you should say that because we’ve tried to make it very clear that we’re not aiming to make a strictly anime-related magazine. I suppose we haven’t been the most effective in doing that so far. The main goal behind PiQ is to cover various forms of entertainment, and while we’re still primarily focused on anime, we also know that there are other interesting things worth covering too.

Nevertheless, thanks for the words of support (I think) and I hope you’ll stick with us as we continue to grow and improve.

Then mine:

Thanks for commenting.

I guess part of what I was getting across is that my feelings about the first issue were mixed. I was glad that it was still (mostly) anime related, since I feared that it might be just kind of there to appease the masses, which ended up not being the case.

As for mixing in other stuff, I think that’s more of a preference of the reader. If people don’t mind the other stuff being mixed in, then I think the magazine works perfectly fine. I guess me personally liked how NewType was more anime-centric and so I was kind of annoyed by the additional stuff, but as I said, that’s more personal preference than anything.

I still have something like 5 issues to go on my subscription, so I’ll see whether I warm up to the new set-up by then I guess.

I should add that it’s true that they weren’t really marketing PiQ as “an anime magazine” so in a sense my negative on that point was a little off-base. I guess I’m still just used to it being a completely anime-centric magazine and it moving off of that. So in reality, the magazine is what they advertised it to be, largely.

I guess my biggest beef as far as how the magazine is set up, regardless of it’s actual content is what I highlighted in point 1, where things didn’t really seemed to be grouped together in sections anymore. I suppose one could argue that’s what the table of contents is for.