This time around it's a double review, because I feel like it. One is another oldie from a favorite circle of mine, that I managed to dig out of the 'almost out of stock' pile over at Otaku Republic; the other one is a new release from Comiket 89, from a circle I have been eyeing for a while but that I was largely unfamiliar with up until now.
少女と活字 (Type and Daughter) is one of the few dōjinshi by Heikinritsu I was still missing from my collection. I have been postponing this specific purchase for one single reason: there are apparently two versions of this dōjinshi, and I really wanted the 'amended' one, but couldn't seem to find it anywhere. I eventually settled for the regular one, dating 2003.
A4 size, black and white, cardboard cover and very nice, thick paper. As with basically all of Heikinritsu's dōjinshi, this is a concept piece: essentially, anthropomorphizations of types - as in, typographic types. We have a nice, broad selection: 14 types total, ranging from familiar Garamond to exotic OCR-B. For each type we have a two-page spread, where the female figure embodying the type sits along with a very, very technical explanation of the font's history and use. Technical as in, 'you won't parse it unless fluent in Japanese'. Which I am not, so I mostly browsed and focused on the pictures.
Each type / girl is set against a blank background, in the no-frills, almost abstract style so typical of Heikinritsu. There are (as often happens with the circle's work) a few anatomical inconsistencies, but all is forgiven once again: their chicks are simply too cute to ignore, and the pencil-based tract is a nice break from the usually oversaturated world of illustration dōjinshi. Another difficulty is, as often happens with anthropomorphizations, the sometimes arbitrary link between the source item and the girl: it's all based on the artist's personal take on the font's visual qualities; so, sometimes the connection was easy to see, sometimes I just couldn't tell why a font had been moefied in a certain way. It's all about the artist's interpretation, and you just kind of have to go along for the ride. All in all, not my absolute favorite from Heikinritsu (Alexander Calder's Sweetheart is), but still a novel and worthy read.
For a totally different kind of work... one circle I have been eyeing for a long time is Sayu STUDIO. I have a soft spot for dōjinshi that go beyond the typical 'illustrations collection' format, trying different and new ways of communicating; furthermore, I have an even softer spot for... well, let's call them 'instructional dōjinshi'; that is to say, works that treat some aspect of a special interest topic through the medium of text+illustration. Says STUDIO does that, and the topic is food: essentially, their dōjinshi are short, themed recipe books adorned with moe illustrations and, even more, some seriously gorgeous visual food porn. They are usually very pricey and stock disappears at lightning speed,but this time around I managed to snag for a reasonable price their Comiket 89 release from past December: パスタと休日 vol.9, which is all about pasta.
A4 sized, the book is fairly thin (only 20 pages) but full color and very professionally printed: the cover art is particularly stunning. One downside is that there really aren't many illustrations at all: four in the whole dōjinshi, to be exact - all by talented artist Nanahime. I wished for more, but what was offered in their place made up for it. The recipes, a series of fairly simple but very tasty looking pasta dishes, take a two-page spread each: one side has the actual recipe, with written explanations along with a visual guide; the other page is a picture / piece of food porn showing the dish all tidied up and arranged on a plate.
I am planning to dedicate a future blog post to my results trying out the recipes, but it bears mentioning that the dōjinshi is, regardless, a very well crafted piece of design: one of the best designed I have ever come across, actually, and laid out far better than most 'actual' recipe books. A few pages toward the end are spent discussing some high end appliances for blending or making coffee, 'hardware reviews' of sorts. Interesting, but the recipes is where it's at.
So, two different works for two different ways of conceptualizing the dōjinshi, each with its own strengths. This month's shipment is unrelated, but there's more I'd like to get from Sayu STUDIO - and, of course, that elusive Hatsune Miku thingy from Heikinritsu...
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