Omnipresence in Wired

From Serial Experiments Lain wiki
The cover of the first edition as it appears with the plastic slip cover. The slip cover is transparent and marked with the title and white shading. The cover itself has only the picture of lain.
The 2006 edition has a cardboard slip cover (pictured). The actual cover is dark blue and unadorned except for the title and the words "Hello NAVI."

An Omnipresence in Wired is the Serial Experiments Lain artbook that was released only in Japan in 1999. A heavily modified version, ab# rebuild, was released in 2006 in both Japan and the United States.

It contains illustrations by Yoshitoshi Abe, some of which feature text by Chiaki Konaka. The manga The Nightmare of Fabrication is included.

Note that any of the following information regarding the 2006 version is obtained from the hardcover English edition by Digital Manga Publishing. If you have the softcover edition, or the Japanese edition from Wani Magazine, please feel free to edit this page with information on them.

Contents

Under construction lol

an omnipresence in wired (1999)

Page No. Contents Description
001 Title page The title of the book with a bunch of identical pictures of lain, except withdifferent photoshop effects added to them.
002 Contents The book's contents page. Most of the data in this table is taken from this page. Except the descriptions.
003 Introduction A few paragraphs by ABe, with a translation, talking about his concept of Lain's existence and how it was manifested in his creative process.
004 the original layers Illustrations that originally appeared in Sony Magazines' AX magazine in 1998. Some of them are overlaid with Japanese text by Konaka, most of which is translated to English.
046 VHS/LD jackets (lif.)
052 sound track cover (CD)
055 hair cut
056 pre-image
058 posters & others
066 game illustrations
078 special issue "the nightmare of fabrication" (DC1029) Untranslated in this edition. See Manga for more information.
097 sketches (monochrome)
118 about the layers (AB with CJK) Untranslated. Abe and Konaka having a conversation about the Layers illustrations. The title of each Layer illustration is listed with the magazine issue it was originally published in.
122 about all of the illustrations Untranslated. An index of comments by Abe about every illustration in the book and information on where each of them was originally published.
127 history of AB Untranslated. A paragraph of general information about Abe, then a "general chronology" of events in his life starting in 1993 when he entered college, then a "fragile goods chronology" listing every computer he'd owned since 1990 (I think?)
The book has a total of 128 pages.

yoshitoshi ABe lain illustrations: ab# rebuild an omnipresence in wired (2006)

Note: The pages are not numbered, so this might not be very useful. This book doesn't even have a contents page.

Page No. Contents Description
001 Title page A picture of Lain on a semitransparent piece of paper.
This book has a total of 153 pages.

Differences between the two editions

Also under constructino lol

One would think that since Rebuild is 25 pages longer, it has more content. But it's not really so; some images that were printed on a single page in the original were given two pages in Rebuild. Rebuild also has many dividing pages that are blank except for the title of the next section of the book. Things like this contribute to the book's length without providing much new content over the original. There are even some sketches that appear in the original which did not make it into Rebuild.

What Rebuild has that the original does not have

  • bigger pictures

more details to come

What the original has that Rebuild does not have