A Revolutionary Girl Utena spread led me to grab this used, and because I archive like a maniac, I also scanned the insert sub-magazine that sits at the centerfold: Animedia's 'Anime Eye: By Reader for Reader.' Check those out below!
Can I read any of it? Nope! But it's chock-full of vintage 1997 Revolutionary Girl Utena fanart that dropped as the show came out. A really neat artifact! I also scanned the advert image above of the first release of the series on home media.
Twitter user @Alex_Swak recently uploaded a scan of a book they they are just sharing out of their Google Drive - given the link rot odds against a twitter post containing a GD link, I asked them if I could host it out of the Internet Archive for longevity purposes, and they kindly agreed.
So, the Future Boy Conan "Black Book":
This book was published in 1979, going into ridiculously intense detail about the production of Future Boy Conan, the anime that in a lot of ways launched Hayao Miyazaki's career as a director. It contains 328 pages of concept art, storyboards, designs, along with a 32 page interview with him about the show and wider thoughts about anime, art, etc.
I do not think very many books of this magnitude about a production have ever been written before; beyond a ton of text it contains things like environment sketches:
A collection on merchandise made for the show, which is adorable:
And this absolute boss photo of legendary animator Yasuo Otsuka, character designer & animation director for the show:
I wont pretend I have read the work or anything, I am only the messenger on this one and have just skimmed it. I can't say yet how much of its content is unique versus available elsewhere in magazine interviews, settei collections, etc, that is extremely common for books like these. It definitely looks to be an amazing resource for those interested in the early years of Japan's anime industry though, so if that is you I recommend it. May we add another entry into the Akashic Record of anime history ^_^
Newtype Magazine's December 1997 issue headlines Revolutionary Girl Utena with a six page, front of magazine spread to celebrate the finale that aired on Christmas Eve, yep, that's right. We'll do something, we just don't know what yet, lmao.