Recently, I was diving through the Internet Archive, looking through old Serial Experiments Lain fan sites. One of those websites was the so-called “diosa_lain” website, also known as “Serial Experiments Lain: Who is Lain?”
The website seems to have been created by a fan of Lain from Mexico, and has archives that stretch all the way back to 2004. It’s one of the earliest Spanish-speaking Lain fansites that I’ve found so far!
One interesting corner of the website was the “Imagenes” (Pictures) section. I always like to scour through the galleries of old Lain fan sites to see if there are any old pieces of fan art that haven’t been archived yet. Plus, it’s fun to get an idea of what art and content Lain fans were enjoying over 20 years ago.
With this fan site, I was in luck – not only did they have a surprising amount of photos that were archived, but they also had some extremely well-drawn fan art in relatively high resolution! I’ve included my favorite picture below.
I was immediately curious: Who drew this art? Where had it been published? It was available on this website as far back as August 29th, 2004, so I knew it had been drawn before then…
I performed a reverse image search on the artwork using the service TinEye, which brought me to Safebooru, which led me to Danbooru – a well-known repository of anime fan art.
The photo was uploaded to Danbooru on 2009-11-02, by the user “dotKuro”. Interestingly, the version of the image on Danbooru was actually lower resolution than the version from the 2004 fan website! (205×600, vs. 400×1168). This is likely a symptom of being saved and reposted across so many fan sites for so many years…
Also, I was in luck – danbooru listed the artist’s name: kobaneko. Unfortunately, the source of the image was incorrect – it linked back to a Russian Lain fansite from the mid-2000’s (lain.ru) instead of kobaneko’s website… but we were getting closer.
Clicking further through Danbooru, they had 8 total kobaneko images archived, so I decided to look through each of them – and finally got a hit! (I know there are more than 8 images in that screenshot, but that’s because I uploaded a few while working on this blog post…)
This Lain fanart was uploaded to the service way back on 2008-11-21, by the user “Shinjidude”. Checking the source, it seems to properly link back to kobaneko’s website: http://www4.cds.ne.jp/~kobaneko/cg/gazou/cg/lain/lain-10.JPG
Moving back to the Internet Archive, I plugged in the new URL and checked the sitemap – we were in business! Over a thousand saved pages, mainly spanning from 1999 to 2004. It seems sometime after 2004 the website was abandoned and eventually went offline… I hope kobaneko is doing well.
If you have the time, I highly recommend checking out the various artwork presented on kobaneko’s website – they are/were a very skilled artist. Their website can be browsed on the Internet Archive at the link below:
Kobaneko Homes – https://web.archive.org/web/20041205154651/http://www4.cds.ne.jp/~kobaneko/cg/index2.html
Links & Citations
- “diosa_lain”, aka: Serial experiments Lain: Who is Lain?
- Original URL: http://mx.geocities.com/diosa_lain/link.html
- Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20091027000950/http://mx.geocities.com/diosa_lain/
- Kobaneko Homes
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