"How Much Are You Worth?": The Multiple Continues of Kazuya Minakura's Bus Gamer

Like many successful mangaka, Kazuya Minekura's career & legacy is defined mostly by a single work: Saiyuki, her purposefully loose reinterpretation of iconic Chinese novel Journey to the West as a zany road trip mixed with the occasional character drama & action scene, with our four main characters being turned into a chain-smoking heretic monk, a rambunctious wild child, an egotistical womanizer, & the de facto family dad; also, their horse is now a jeep. However, & obviously so, there is more to Minekura than just Saiyuki (& its various sequels, prequels, & spin-offs), and some of these other manga have received anime adaptations of their own. Two of them (Wild Adapter & Araiso Private High School Student Council Executive Committee) were both adapted into two-episode OVAs so they're both ideal for Oh Me, Oh My, OVA! (or at least a twin-review "Double Feature", as they are sort of related), but there's one other anime adaptation that I've been meaning to cover here pretty much since the beginning, simply because it's a bit of an oddity by its very existence. However, said anime adaptation is really the (current?) end point of a truly interesting life for this series, so let's be lazy & just input "AAA" when asked for our initials before deciding to try again as we go over the life (or maybe that'd actually be lives) of Kazuya Minekura's Bus Gamer.

To be fair, this does look like three guys
who are annoyed because they just missed the bus.

Before we get into the series itself, though, there's some publication & release history to go over, because it's a wee bit confusing & various places online have it wrong. Bus Gamer (pronounced "Biz Gamer", as in "Business") originally debuted sometime in 1999 in the pages of Enix's Monthly Stencil and may have actually been one of the very first manga serialized in the magazine, back when it was originally a quarterly supplement to G-Fantasy magazine (which is where Saiyuki originally ran). However, Bus Gamer actually only appeared on a bimonthly basis once Stencil became its own monthly magazine in 2001, and by the start of 2002 only 11 chapters had come out before it suddenly stopped getting published. While some have guessed that Bus Gamer was a victim of Monthly Stencil being cancelled altogether by Enix, that didn't actually happen until mid-2003. Instead, Bus Gamer's sudden stop was more a circumstance of Kazuya Minekura swapping publishers in early 2002. To keep it simple, Enix was going through a "family squabble" (yes, that's the literal translation for the term used) in 2001, which resulted in various staff establishing the publishers Mag Garden (which Enix actually went to court over, resulting in a settlement) & Ichijinsha (originally Issaisha), but the main focus here is that Kazuya Minekura was one of the managaka who wound up siding with Ichijinsha, more or less ending her association with Enix; this is also why Saiyuki transitioned into Saiyuki Reload. However, prior to all of this, Enix did manage to release a "Volume 1" for Bus Gamer in mid-2001, which included the first eight chapters, as well as produce a promotional anime short for the manga that saw release on VHS sometime in 2001. However, this is only the first half of Bus Gamer's general history!

Obscusion B-Side: Looking Back at Dynamite & Marvel Bringing the Golden Age Into the Modern Age, 15 Years Later

On April 13, 1938, National Comics Publications released Action Comics #1, an anthology which introduced a variety of brand new comic superheroes, including Zatara, Master Magician (the eventual father of modern-day magic superhero Zatanna) & Tex Thompson (a.k.a. Mr. America & Americommando), but the one that became the biggest star of all was Superman. This single comic would later be considered the start of "The Golden Age of Comic Books", coming after the Platinum Age, which would run all throughout World War II & wouldn't end until 1956 with Showcase #4, which introduced the second Flash, Barry Allen, & started the Silver Age. The Golden Age was one of superheroes of any & all kinds, created by many writers & artists who didn't make sure to claim ownership over their creations & published by many publishers that would eventually go out of business, resulting in many of these characters going into the public domain. Others, meanwhile, would remain copyrighted by publishers that continue to exist, or at lewere bought by other publishers who have since maintained those copyrights. Over the decades, many characters from the Golden Age would go on to either return in some way in more "modern" times, or they would be represented by legacy characters who take on their names (& sometimes powers), but otherwise are their own characters.

A little OVER 70 years apart, but the sentiment remains.

However, in time for the 70th Anniversary of the Golden Age's start, both Dynamite Entertainment & Marvel published a number of comic series, some of which even being co-published by them, with a specific goal in mind: Bringing Golden Age Heroes Into the Modern Age. Naturally, this was far from the first or only time this kind of concept was done in comics history, but the fact that multiple mini & maxi-series were introduced in 2008, with one receiving a follow-up (or sorts) in 2009, really does give the idea that they were all done to celebrate 70 years since Action Comics #1 started the Golden Age. Now, in 2023, it's both the 85th Anniversary of Superman's debut & the 15th Anniversary of these "Bringing Golden Age Heroes Into the Modern Age" comics, and since I've happened to be reading them recently I figure I can go into each of them & take a look at how each one looked at this shared overall concept.