Oh yeah! After a far too long hiatus, we're so back, with another fresh batch of Mandarake purchases ready to be hastily discussed and displayed in all of their grainy glory. As for the actual reason why I've been away this long... well, I just was. I also made a megawad for Doom in the meantime.
Our first offering for our return to style is, by pop culture standard, a relic - a relic from 2015, to be exact. ねこ助 (Nekosuke) is a popular and affirmed illustrator, sporting almost 200k followers on Twitter (yes, it's Twitter, get rekt), and a similarly beefy following on both PIXIV and Instagram. While working within the usual canon of bishoujo illustration, they have a very distinct visual style, borrowing less from anime and more from sources such as childer's books, European illustrations and that whole aesthetics that, today, would be lumped somewhere in the cottagecore orbit. Their spindly, emaciated young girls, often accompanied by painstakingly rendered animals, live in a washed out world of near monochrome, occasionally touched by a hint of pastel. Very refined and porcelain doll-ish.
Anyway, I've been eyeing for a while a specific publication of theirs, titled "Exotica" - a short (20 pages), full color, A5 illustration book depicting Nekosuke's signature girls' interactions with a select group of animals, in pairs of two. Yeah, I know what you're thinking... no yiffing here, sorry. What we get, instead, is a series of two page spreads: on the left page, a full body of the girl and the animal, aesthetics trimmed to match; on the right page, the girl enjoying (?) the company of said animal. While all this might sound cutesy, there is a distinct undertone of darkness in Nekosuke's illustrations: the girls, at times, seem to be worried or frightened by their totem animal's oppressive presence, and the vaguely dark fairytale-like limericks accompanying each pair hint at a darker truth behind the facade. Why should we ask the deer to tread lightly? spooky.
Visually, the booklet is well within Nekosuke's style, delicate illustrations that appear, at times, once colored but now greyed by time and wear. The environments are well constructed, the animals are for the most part close to realistic in their portrayal, and the doll-like girls are appropriately different yet similar in a Platonic ideal kind of way. A style that, from what I can see, even ten years later Nekosuke wouldn't stray from.
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