Item Spotlight: Cover Charge
A box the size of a paperback, a mock telephone dial on the lid, two telephone cards and one art card inside, and a price sticker that still reads 3,300 yen. Wanimagazine, 1999. The artist is Range Murata, and the box is the reason to read this.
The object
Two NTT telephone cards (teleca), each printed with a Murata illustration, plus a printed art card, all seated in the original retail box. The box is the part that usually does not survive. Condition is very good: shelf wear on the box, light scuffing and a few dirt marks on the card corners, all in the photos. Complete, nothing swapped in. Every Murata Wanimagazine card I have checked carries the copyright line PASTA'S ESTAB RANGE MURATA WANIMAGAZINE CO., LTD. PASTA'S ESTAB is his own studio mark. If a card claims to be his and does not carry that line, keep walking.
Who Murata is
Range Murata (Murata Renji) was born October 2, 1968 in Osaka. His early work was character design and illustration for Atlus, on the Power Instinct fighting games. Then he moved into anime: concept design on Blue Submarine No. 6 (1998), and character and mechanical design on Last Exile (2003), which is the one most people know him for. He picked up the Seiun Award for Best Artist in 2006. The style is easy to spot once you know it: retro-future machinery, goggles, industrial clothing, and girls drawn with a precision that reads more like product design than pin-up. Dieselpunk with moe on top. Nobody else's work looks like it.
Wanimagazine, and the misreading to get out of the way
Wanimagazine is the publisher of Comic Kairakuten, a monthly adult manga magazine that has run since 1994. Murata's illustrations are its cover art. That leads a lot of people to file him as a hentai artist, and that is wrong in a specific way. He is the cover artist for an adult magazine. He is not drawing what is inside it. Those are different jobs. The covers are the reason Wanimagazine became his art book publisher: Like a Balance Life (1997, B4, 5,000 yen, two loose-bound books in a decorative box), the 0.5 reprint (2000), futurhythm (2003), and onward. Every serious Murata piece from this era comes through that one adult publisher, which is why so much of his best early work sits behind a wall that has nothing to do with the art on the front.
The 1999 set
The Murata bibliography kept at long range bullet lists a 1999 Wanimagazine release as the Telephone Card Book: a set of two phone cards, artwork from Kairakuten, in a hardcover book-style case with a mock phone dial on the top. That matches this box. The box also carries the 4D mark, and Japanese auction listings for the same two-card set call it 4D Products. I could not confirm what 4D stood for, whether a product line, an imprint, or a design label inside Wanimagazine. I am not going to guess. It is on the box, it is in the auction records, and that is where my knowledge stops.
Telephone cards themselves: prepaid NTT payphone cards, 50 units (50度数) was the common denomination, and by the late 90s they were mostly a print medium wearing a phone card costume. Magazines ran them as reader prizes, artists sold them as merchandise, and the good ones were never fed into a phone. An unused card has no punch holes along the edge, so check the photos, and ask if they do not show what you need.
What one is worth, honestly
On Yahoo Auctions Japan, a Murata 4D Products two-card set has closed at 1,700 yen, box and condition not stated. A Kairakuten lottery-prize Murata teleca, unused and A rank, closed at 8,000 yen. Those are domestic prices before a proxy fee, before shipping, and before you find one. The premium on this copy is the complete box with the art card and the original sticker. Loose cards turn up. The box does not.
Price here is $120. That is the whole set, box and all, and it is the only one I have.