[November 19th, 2025]

More mail, more exciting stuff

Another exciting day for the archive and museum, the next mail haul came in yesterday and there's some very exciting stuff within.

First up, the January 2005 issue of Monthly Shounen GanGan. This was an impluse buy solely because it has the artwork for Ichikawa's Beyond the Endless Sky manga on the cover. I bought this betting it had some artwork in it, and it did!

The following images are something I never expected, to be completely honest.

A full colour page of the manga and some original artwork that hasn't seen the light of day in over 20 years. Once I've completed moving and have my equipment set back up, this magazine will be debound and archived (there's over 800 pages per issue for those unaware of this comic magazine)

While I'm very excited to have unearthed this piece of artwork and the full colour manga page, I'm kinda sad though because I was sorta expecting to find coloured versions of the artwork featured in the first couple pages in each volume of Beyond the Endless Sky. The hunt will continue though, as the two other issues of Monthly Shounen GanGan I own don't feature any colour artwork or manga pages for it. I fully intend to own and archive every single issue that Beyond the Endless Sky was serialised in, I'm currently looking at 17 issues likely worth a couple grand all said and done. I saw some recently sold listings for a couple issues and they sold for anywhere between 400$USD and 900$USD, mostly because of the god damn animecore and nostalgia craze going on.

Next up is a doujinshi I've never seen before by an artist who has long nuked most, if not all, of their FFCC related artworks from the web due to rampant art theft back in the day:

Before anyone asks: no, I will not be sharing scanlations of the contents; not just out of respect for the artist but also because I already have a disclaimer about this up in the Library section. If you want to see/read the contents of this doujinshi (or any of the doujinshi I have listed in the Library, for that matter), go hunt down and buy your own copies. The sole purpose of showcasing this is both proof that it exists and for documentation at a later date.

And next up is the November 2009 Issue of ASCII Mediaworks' Dengeki Games magazine:

This has already been archived on the Internet Archive [here], but the colour quality and page misalignment genuinely pisses me off to a very unreasonable degree, so I'm going to upload my own scans. This specific issue has some Crystal Bearers content in it:

On topic of Crystal Bearers, I have done the impossible. I have gotten my grubby mitts on the very elusive Crystal Bearers keychain:

This is big news because I have only seen four or five sold listings for this thing that span back almost 10 years. The worst thing is though, I saw this for sale earlier this year but missed it by a few days because my search terms weren't as extensive as they are now. The listing I missed by a few days back in January sold I think for roughly 500 or 600 yen, while the listing I snagged a couple weeks ago I paid an eye-watering 2500 yen, almost 4x the price. But I coughed up for it because who knows if another one will ever go up for sale in the future.

What surprised me the most though about this keychain, is that despite being almost 20 years old it's in relatively perfect condition and it was unopened. So I had the fun time of carefully peeling back the product info tag without damaging it too much so I could better examine it:

The fun thing is that it's doublesided, the not fun things are due to the seam line that extends across the entire charm means it's likely made of plastic and due to the fact this thing is almost 20 years old, the leather bolo strap is slowly deteriorating.

Were this mine to keep, I would be ripping this thing to shreds to address the deteriorating leather bolo strap. But alas, this is a gift for someone else who's been looking for it for several years. The most I'm comfortable doing with it is unhooking the charm from the bolo strap so I can make multiple moulds and resin masters for bootleg shenanigans.

While I'm on the topic of the bootleg keychains, I've worked out (for the most part) what I want to do: because Square Enix likes to cut corners on their already limited quantity merchandise, once I have the money I'm going to go all out and fully cast this thing in real metals and include genuine 10mm turqouise beads. For the time being, they'll be cast in resin hand painted with Howlite turqouise beads but once I get the Big Boy money I'm going to cast this stuff in different silvers and golds. As for the leather bolo strap, that will stay as it is; I want to learn to do some level of leathercraft and make my own but I may wind up buying a premade spool as an intermediary solution.

I'm hoping the next thing I find for sale is the sterling silver Clavat pendant necklace, I'd do lots of things to get my hands on it to make bootlegs out of it:

Alas, this thing is even rarer than the Crystal Bearers keychain with only 2 known sold auctions, so my only solace is to try to model this (along with the other tribe symbols and Chelinka's pendant) in 3D and print it off of my friend's resin printer.