Steel Society – Newsletter variant

Newsletter sent to the official DMC fan club… wait, whaaaaat?

A bit of context. Toward the end of 2007, riding the wave of the manga’s success and anticipating the upcoming live-action, the official fan club of Detroit Metal City named “Steel Society” was born.

Needless to say, this was not a spontaneous initiative, it was a finely crafted marketing move by the publisher, playing on the thin boundary between fiction and reality. The imaginary band, born within the pages of the manga, suddenly stepped into the tangible world, becoming “real” under the banner of a record label that was both fake and genuine at once: Death Records label, created specifically for the occasion.

After paying 3.940yen (~27$) subscribers received an exclusive package containing:

• Numbered CD plate
• Baseball cap
• Notebook
• Clear case
• T-Shirt
• Strap

and, most importantly, the very first in a series of newsletters that would be mailed out irregularly over the following months. And here lies the peculiarity: this “cover variant” we are looking at is nothing less than the second official fan club newsletter. On the front, the cover; inside, the latest updates from the band.

A small conceptual masterpiece, where the hall-of-mirrors interplay between reality and fiction reached one of its most dazzling moments.