Wall scrolls are still a popular chunk of the anime merchandise market, but I remember them looming largest around the turn of the century, if you can call it that without sounding ancient and weird. As the 1990s drew to a close, fans snapped up all sorts of products based on their favorite anime, even when those products were overpriced or unlicensed or not even visually comprehensible.
In many respects, wall scrolls of that period were questionable purchases. The quality of the print on fabric was rarely as nice as an actual poster, and their appeal was mostly in how easily they could hang on a wall. I had a bunch of them for a while, but in time I realized that if I was going to display my nerd proclivities so readily, I should at least use framed posters.
Before that revelation dawned, however, I was perfectly willing to decorate with wall scrolls of my favorite anime or video games. I recall three of them most vividly, along with the reactions they received...or didn’t.
AN EVANGELION FAMILY PHOTO
I suspect that most of the wall scrolls I owned were not officially licensed products, but one was the real deal: a Neon Genesis Evangelion scroll that I bought during a college trip to Japan. The art was the same as the image below, but the design I had featured the show’s title instead of the odd photo-negative of the characters.
I liked the simplicity of it, how it made Evangelion look like some legal drama or a mystery anthology about a teenage detective. Evangelion was, I reasoned, all about the characters, and I preferred how this piece was free of EVA Units, plugsuits, or any bizarre imagery. This was a time when festooning your wall with any nerd décor was asking for trouble, but I found this Evangelion spread tasteful. I approved of how Shinji looms largest, how Misato is lost in thought, and how Asuka, the abusive time bomb who livens up the show, looks completely happy.
Notable Reaction:
One of my housemates looked at Misato and, noticing her cross necklace, asked “Is she a nurse?”
I could have pointed out that Misato Katsuragi is not in fact a nurse but rather an officer of NERV, a mysterious organization whose clandestine, world-altering machinations she gradually deduces as she struggles to protect the mentally unstable teenage pilots under her charge while reconnecting with her openly double-agent college boyfriend and awkwardly reconciling the survivor’s guilt she has from witnessing the horrific Second Impact that killed her scientist father and billions of other people.
But I just said, “Nah, she’s a military commander.”
DARKSTALKERS
It took me a while to properly appreciate Darkstalkers, but I was hooked by the time Vampire Savior (aka Darkstalkers 3) arrived on home systems in 1998. I decided to get the superior Sega Saturn version, and I noticed that Game Cave, which by then was filling a dozen pages in every issue of GameFan, offered the game with a wall scroll showing art from the Darkstalkers anime series. So I called them up and ordered it, which was actually what you often did before you decided that credit cards were safe on the Internet.
I suspect that this wall scroll was not officially licensed, given that Game Cave had no scruples about selling those ubiquitous Son May anime CD bootlegs alongside legitimate goods. Yet I didn’t care when I could play Vampire Savior on my Saturn and hang Morrigan and Demitri on my wall. It made up for the Darkstalkers anime series and the Darkstalkers cartoon being disappointments in completely different ways.
Memorable Reaction:
It wasn’t long before my relentlessly Catholic mother walked into my room, saw that giant illustration of Morrigan in all her bat-winged succubus splendor, and gasped in surprise. I rolled my eyes and prepared for criticism.
“Look what he put on his wall!” She said, clearly elated. “He’s not gay after all!”
My mother left the room, rapt as a pilgrim at Lourdes, before I could ask any questions or vent any admonitions about her prejudices. She was correct in her assumptions, but I was shocked that she’d needed an anime wall scroll as proof. Even so, it was rare that my parents showed any interest, much less approval, in my anime or video game habits, so I decided to count this as a small victory.
If only that Darkstalkers wall scroll had featured Felicia, the series mainstay who usually wears nothing but very selective fur. I’m sure my mother would have been glad to learn that the nearly naked cat-woman on my wall was also, judging by Vampire Savior’s endings, a nun and therefore a Nice Catholic Girl.
SATOSHI URUSHIHARA’S CHUN-LI
I always liked Chun-Li. It was less an awkward preteen crush and more of a fondness for her as a character, a resilient woman who held her own in Street Fighter and the frequently male-dominated realm of fighting games. Yes, Chun-Li was designed and marketed to an equally male-dominated market, but I sought the higher ground. That extended to a wall scroll.
This art is the work of Satoshi Urushihara, who is hardly a Puritan when it comes to drawing women for games like Growlanser and Langrisser or his original creations like Plastic Little and Legend of Lemnear. He made several illustrations of Chun-Li, and this was the one I liked best. I enjoyed the contrast between her tearful background expression and her more confident foreground pose, and I preferred her Street Fighter Alpha outfit to her less practical original acrobat costume. I even appreciated that while Chun-Li is often rendered with large thighs, Urushihara allowed her a bulkier upper body and thus a more balanced physique, portraying an image of strength layered atop vulnerability.
Yes, I had thought about this wall scroll. I had analyzed it. I was prepared to defend it and extol its artistic merits to anyone who noticed and remarked on it.
Notable Reaction:
No one noticed or remarked, actually. All my rationalizations went to waste, probably because Chun-Li wasn’t on my wall for long. I was a weird contradiction of a nerd, willing to wallpaper my dorm room with Masamune Shirow art and RPG posters while never, never actually discussing anime or video games with others unless I was rock-certain that they were as into it as I was. It's not as though I would raise my hand in my History of Art class and announce that I had an artistically semi-nude Chun-Li on my wall. This was many years before Nicki Minaj’s song, after all.
Eventually that socially uptight half of me triumphed, and most of those wall scrolls, Chun Li among them, were stored away while I tried to balance some anime or video-game decorations with posters of Radiohead, Tori Amos, or Mulholland Drive.
Like many things I valued as a young anime nerd, my wall scrolls were swiftly sold when I needed money more than a tapestry of awkwardly positioned Xenogears artwork. I don’t really miss them, and I’m not even sure if I even miss that time in my life when I’d spend money recklessly just to show the world how much I liked Evangelion or Darkstalkers or Chun-Li. I can do that much cheaper right here.
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