Shannara

The exact same face I did when I realized what a mockery of Shannara, books I grew up with in my teen years, this hideous series is. Sure, it wasn't particularly faithful nor brilliant in its own right so far, but... disco-loving Hamish? Star Trek? please.

This is fantasy for the Jersey Shore generation, the same generation that just doesn't get it: fantasy is about being someone else you'll never get the chance to be in real life, for the space of a book or a film, and it's definitely not about 'edging up' shit for the sake of teen cred. Fantasy is simply not something you update at will. Thinking that we won't be able to digest classic fantasy unless it includes guns, sexula innuendos and cowboy hats is, quite frankly, offensive, and you were proven wrong almost ten years ago.

So fuck you, Terry Brooks, for selling your soul to MTV; and fuck you, MTV, for serving this steaming pile of shit and trying to make us grateful for it. Would have been better to have no adaptation at all? you bet.

Also, dear Amberle, you are yet another step back in the evolutionary scale of elves. There is room for a very limited number of elven ladies in my heart, and you're not one of them.

You, however...

CRYSTAL SHAPE by VV.AA.

One of the things that surprised me the most when I first began exploring the wonderful world of dōjin circles, was how often the second term turned out to be a misnomer. A circle implies more than one person taking part, so I imagined that most dōjin circles would work like I saw on Otaku No Video or Genshiken: a bunch of people getting together to pump out more or less amazing stuff.
Surprise surprise, that seems to be more the exception than the rule: almost all of the dōjinshi I own are produced by so-called kojin sākuru (個人サークル) - aka, circles made up of a single person. So, basically, a pen name, or a vanity label. Must come handy when they go mainstream and decide to baleet everything off the face of the Internet.

While circles actually made of more than one person might be getting more rare, one common occurrence I found is a bunch of artist collaborating together by piecing their own sections for a one-off dōjinshi, using their own personal or circles' names. Usually but not always they would heavily feature someone already established, with a few more or less unknown trailing behind. These kinds of buys have been very hit and miss: some, like Fossil Antique's amplifier, left a lot to be desired; others, like the anthology(?) I'll be reviewing today, actually got me to know a few very good artists I wasn't aware of previously.

Crystal Shape  (2009) was, by non limited edition dōjinshi  standards, a fairly expensive purchase ( I think I shelled the equivalent of $25), and one that I pretty much did on タカハシヒロユキ (Takahashi Hiroyuki)'s name alone. A household figure in Japan's alternative culture scene, Takahashi is now a fairly well known figure among superflat and Mood Shōjo aficionados, mostly thanks to a visually stunning but very generic-feeling collaboration with Crunchyroll which mostly seems to have spawned merchandise and vapor.

Regardless, one thing I appreciate is that, while Takahashi vastly overshadows the others in terms of notoriety, her art does not take the lion's share of this fifty pages, large format, full color anthology - she gets only one page more than the rest. Each artist, with few exceptions, has been given four pages in total, paired two by two. For each 'pair', on one page the artist presents a themed character design, which then has a little manga built around them on the second page. So, two character designs and two short stories to each artist.The theme of Crystal Shape seems to be 'elements', understood in a far wider sense than even Eastern cosmology makes allowance for: we have 'earth', 'fire' and 'water', but also 'poison' and 'crystal' - not elements in any system I am aware of. Not a big deal, as what matters is that, for the most part, the artists actually do take the theme into account, and we'd probably be able to tell which element is represented at a glance in most cases.

First comes コバヤシ・ヒロト (Kobayashi Hiroto), whose main claim to fame seems to be the zillion homonyms he sports: I wasn't able to find a blog, nor a Pixiv of this artist, and the web site given at the end of the book is defunct. He (I assume) chose the 'crystal' and 'earth' themes, which are developed in a somewhat uninspired way: for some reason a character centered around crystals dresses like a Playboy centerfold and features bunny ears, and the 'earth' character is a slender and windswept looking shōjo I wouldn't really associate with dirt, dust and the underground. The manga, unfortunately, isn't that great either, well colored but really hastily drawn. Not the best start.

Fortunately, we pick up pace with おきの (Okino), who actually has a Pixiv page with some very high quality work. Their chosen theme are 'fire' and 'ice', both executed with a color-filled bravado that left me literally speechless: their character designs are dynamic and modern while very Edo-looking; and their manga pages actually do manage to tell a cute, short story in a mere handful of frames. Bold lines, top notch, coloring, definitely the highlight of the dōjinshi.

 

 

Next is GENk, who has a... let's say, peculiar style. I'm not really a fan per se but, if you're the kind of Goth soul that sighs at the mere sight of a Michael Hussar, you're going to love the living crap out of it. Themes are 'water' (actually blood) and 'poison'. While, as I said, this is not really my cup of tea, I must admit the character designs are fairly compelling and well thought out. There surely is skill in here. The accompanying manga are also well made and, at least in one case, grimly funny.

Because we all love exploding wabbits.

For bonus points, an unrelated thing by JENk I actually like. There's also some Idolmaster...
 

Aaand next is Keypot, another very highly skilled moe craftsman whose style is, however, a tad too generic for my taste - or maybe the problem is that, after JENk, pretty much everything feels generic. Themes are 'ice' and 'electricity', both embodied by scantly clad Amazons whose underwear just seem to never cover enough skin - bonus points for addressing the issue in one of the manga. Generic designs aside, Keypot clearly has the chops and is not afraid to display them: the coloring is fresh and bold, if a bit flat, and the layout of the manga pages is interestingly daring.

 

 Also, lovely Engrish. Moving on. Next is おぐち (Oguchi), another skilled artist that seems to have fallen off the face of the planet, at least under this name. Some great art in this Pixiv, check it out. The work on parade inside Crystal Shape is equally good: themes are 'fire' and 'ice', represented by two girls and their elemental - funny enough, a cold elemental for the fire chick, and the other way round. Oguchi has a peculiar sense for depth and shading that the other artists' often supermodern anime sensibilities do not explore: both the character design pages and the manga make ample use of abstraction and negative space in order to create flow and narration, to great effect. Another lighlight of the dōjinshi.

UCMM is next, marking yet another shift in style - unlike Oguchi's gritty and grainy textures, UCMM's have the sleek, plastic-like features of a hypermodern graffiti. Maybe a bit too hypermodern for my taste but, once again, the quality is undeniable: following the themes of 'electricity' and 'poison' , his character designs are superdeformed and cute, especially the Thunder-Lightning sibling pair. It was just around this point in Crystal Shape that I realized, overall, what a great job the artists did in these one-page manga: most of the times they change a merely 'cool' design into an actual character, that I could totally see animated, with a backstory added and all that. Sign me up for the 'Adventures of the Storm Siblings'.

はっち is next, another artist I couldn't find a iota about - no Pixiv (aside from what I really hope is a homonym), website deader than dead, etc etc. Such a shame, as this one's style is the kind of stuff I would have snobishly disparaged a while ago, and that I absolutely love now. Very deformed, colorful and poppy, visually it's probably the closest to Takahashi's own work, less elaborate but definitely more 'fun', if you get what I mean. A native American-looking wind goddess and a lightning boy make a cute pair with a cute crush, another set of characters I could totally see star in their own manga or web anime series.

No web images make it very hard to link stuff. No, I don't scan my collection.

 

Hakus, now mysteriously called Siana, is probably the one taking the most liberty with the chosen themes: both his 'fire' and 'earth' depictions are fairly standard moe-looking miko with a very slight furry undertone, the latter being the superior one both as a design, and as far as the associated manga page goes. Hakus has a very idiosyncratic style, especially when it comes to soft edges and a relatively subdued palette; so yes, kind of a shame he didn't try to go the extra mile and come up with more original character designs.

Then it's the turn of Takashi Okazaki this FooRider guy; who, at least judging from his web site, does some very good, hip hop / graffiti inspired visual and musical work, the kind of stuff that is actually popular with reason. Kind of a shame, then, that his designs are very uninspired and derivative, not to mention completely unrelated to the themes of 'wind' and 'earth': two generic Afro Samurai dudes who strike a cool pose on one page and kill some dudes on the next one. Definitely not his best work, by far. So, instead of an image, you get a link to his gallery on Facebook.

Drumrolls, aaaand... it's Takahashi's turn! What, no drumrolls? for shame. Then again, don't get me wrong, I love Hiroyuki Takahashi to a fault but, their characters for Crystal Shape are... kind of underwhelming. Themes are 'poison', 'wind' and an extra illustration for 'ice', but the concept are only vaguely followed. I found the 'poison' character the most successful (the kind of visually elaborate, violently colored stuff Takahashi does so well) and the 'wind' one the least (two horned schoolgirls doing pilates? no thanks). I appreciate the humility of putting themselves last but, to be honest, Takahashi's work within Crystal Shape is mid-tier, and pales in comparison to Okino's or Oguchi's. It's also quite inferior to Takahashi's own later and livelier characters, finally rid of the 'dead eye' expression as visible below.

Taking care of the bonus track is v8, who offers three colorful character designs but apparently can't be bothered to keep a Pixiv page or a website afloat. Am I the only one who finds really enraging how some awesome artists simply fall of the face of the earth for no discernible reason? All I could find was a bunch of Danbooru pics and a few character designs for Atlus' Eternal Poison.

So you can have v8's cropped hear angel. Pretty.

 

 Overall a very good dōjinshi, which manages to be much more than a mere star vehicle for Hiroyuki Takahashi. There is also a volume 2, which seems to have a 'killer' or 'hitman' theme - I might get around to it if only because it seems to feature KYAN-DOG, which I absolutely love.
As a little cherry topping the review, a YouTube ad for the dōjinshi...

Self-aggandizing advertisement -2016

You can find my academic profile on Academia.edu. The list of publications is expanding, and there is actually one more that has a lot to do with this blog, scheduled to come out later on - I will talk about it when the time draws nearer. I know recent readers might have noticed I have gotten quite salty over academia in the past few months; with good reason, I think. Still, I'm no entirely abandoning all hope, and I plan to occasionally apply for positions as they show up. I'm simply not going to bother keeping my fingers crossed, 'cause all I got out of that is joint pain.

I also used to write poetry, and had work published in various web and paper outlets - you can find the whole list here, should you be interested. I also have published a novel, but that's a can of worms we'll open some other time - suffice to say, it's no longer available and the publishing house it came out with is not someone I will do business with again. If you really like the obscure, I partecipated in this fun project a few years ago.

Now that the monthly shilling is done, I have a request for you. If you have something meaningful to say on what I post, review or write about - please do say it. I only moderate spam, aside from that all punters are welcome. It's not fun to see those visitor statistics boom overnight, and still feel like I'm talking to myself.

平均律 / HEIKINRITSU

As I mentioned previously, I am kind of a novice as far as dōjinshi collecting goes - mostly due to money costraints, as sites such as Otaku Republic or Toranoana through Tenso.com (never tried the latter) make it easier than ever to find what you're looking for - considering that at least Otaku Republic can also search for stuff they don't have in stock; or stand in line in your place at conventions to snag those limited print runs (at a premium, sadly. Still...).

I find myself, however, slowly getting to the point where I'm no longer just cover shopping, but actually beginning to develop some sort of direction for my collecting. One thing that I ruled out since the beginning are hentai dōjinshi: not only because the subject matter does not interest me enough to open up my purse, but because they are already widely available, sometimes even in translated form, on places like Fakku or E-Hentai, if that's your cup of coffee. Once that was established, I also soon decided to limit myself to 'original' dōjinshi - 'original' as in 'not parodies of other Japanese popular media'; all these qualifiers necessary, since a few of my best purchases could be considered parodies in a wider sense (lol).

While these two directions in collecting were more or less conscious rules I imposed myself so as to waste as little money as possible on irrelevant stuff, one less clear cut choice I made was to focus on dōjinshi with a 'style'. That is to say, something that would set them visually apart from the norm of anime aesthetics - I'm thinking of anything in between Ghibli and KyoAni. Very fuzzy pickets, I admit, but maybe the idea is better summarized by the reaction I got once on a board: 'so you read that stuff just to be different and hip?' Well, yes, maybe I do. Sorry if moe eyes and cow tits do nothing for me -_- Hopefully, these vague directions will also help keeping my reviews interesting and relevant, as there is little to no material in English reviewing this more obscure kinds of dōjinshi works.

Yes, yes, I'm getting to the topic of the review. A circle that fulfils all of my criterias, and one that quickly became my favorite, is 平均律 (Heikinritsu). The circle is a one-man show by Robert Yamamoto (Robamoto), a self styled 'dōjinshi rebel'; a label that I think describes his work quite well. He is active since 2000, and he also has a fairly active Twitter (in Japanese, of course). While his main outlet are dōjin conventions such as Comiket and Comitia, it seems like he is gearing up to make the move toward 'mainstream' recognition, as his work has also been featured on higher profile publications. Hopefully he won't baleet everything in the move, like another circle I will review later on did. Grrrr.He is not as prolific as others in the media, having published eight dōjinshi and a handful of collaborations.

Although he actually has video readthroughs of all his works on his website, a very nice move in a world where you usually end up buying on the cover alone, I will be focusing on the three works of his that I actually own: くろいブラウスのあのこ (Those Girls in Black Blouses); パラメトリック (Parametric); and アレクサンダー・カルダーの恋人 (Alexander Calder's Sweetheart). Some of his older stuff is pretty much unavailable, but I'm still searching...

 

As you can guess from the covers, all of his works feature shōjo. Doesn't get more vanilla that this, does it? Well, think again. The real draw is that each of Heikinritsu's dōjinshi takes the shōjo archetype so commonplace in media and throws it into a theme piece where a clear, defined conceptual thesis is explored through the visual medium. These are probably as close as we can get to a 'conceptual dōjinshi', if such a thing actually makes any sense. This intellectual endeavour, coupled with his amazingly minimal aesthetics has quickly made Heikinritsu my favorite circle by far.


 くろいブラウスのあのこ  is one of Heikinritsu's oldest works (2007), and the conceptual underpinning is still somewhat flimsy. There is a generic concept of 'the visual interplay of black on black' going on, and visually the result is stunning; but, mostly, Heikinritsu is just drawing cute girls, and he's... well, okay. His facial expressions are interesting and compelling, but he clearly has difficulties in anatomy and hands/feet in particular. The shading and the coloring, however, are top notch, and this still was a buy I did not regret.

パラメトリック is a much later offering (2014) and shows, instead, a compelling and fully developed concept behind the work as a whole. I am absolutely ignorant of fractals, processing, frameworks, generative graphics and such, so I will not comment on those - Heikinritsu does, in an afterword to the dōjinshi, with examples of code and all that jazz. The basic thing, it seems, is that he has built his shōjo around (or, rather, within) fractals and nets produced through specific types of mathematically-laden image generation processes: attaining, as a result, girls scantily clad in curves, fractals and geometric shapes. Beyond the novelty concept, the impressive thing is how effortlessly Heikinritsu inserts the human figure into the computer-produced shapes and lines so that, in the best instances (almost all of them) the two become perfectly entwined. He also display an underlying sense of whimsy I happen to really dig. There are still some problems with hands and feet, but all is forgiven. 

Finally, a while ago I managed to lend my grubby paws onto a work I had been sniping for a while: アレクサンダー・カルダーの恋人, where Heikinritsu pits his cute girls against... Calder's mobiles and stabiles. For those unfamiliar with the artist, Alexander Calder (1898-1976) is a giant of sculpting, as well as a topical figure of Conceptual art, mostly famous for his mobiles, delicately balanced scupltures made of colored shapes held together by wire. His art is fantastic, he made wire portraits, and you should really read up on him.
Each of Heikinritsu's illustration is a minimalist masterpiece: a girl and a sculpture are located in the same empty, white, gallery-like setting and allowed to visually interact in all kinds of interesting ways. Color is king, and the daring juxtapositions are a pleasure to look at: unlike パラメトリック, which is in full B&W and パラメトリック, which is full color, アレクサンダー・カルダーの恋人 is mostly color with a few B&W drawings toward the end - even these monochrome sketches are, however, fantastic. Definitely one of my favorite dōjinshi in general.

I am still hunting for what's out there. Heikinritsu also produced a very intresting looking Hatsune Miku dōjinshi, which also seems to be fairly experimental, visually and thematically - will definitely try to track down this one. Next probable purchase, however, might be his latest: Bodoni and the Red Eurocel, which looks way too cool even on screen.

EDIT: not related to dōjinshi per se, but it turns out Kohji Robert Yamamoto is also a researcher and entrepreneur. He is art director for Euphrates ltd, a digital media company with some interesting work under its belt, some of which really show Heikinritsu's fingerprint: compare, for example, パラメトリック and this.

NOCTURNE by Nishimata Aoi

The dōjinshi world is pretty much predicated on minimal budgets. Being (in most cases) an amateur and informal kind of publication, it's not unusual for a colorful, high production cover to hide only a few pages of black and white sketches. I no longer get mad about this. I have simply accepted it's part of the medium; it is, however, a real pleasure when a 'look at that pretty cover' impulse purchase nets me something that actually has a *higher* production value than the average dōjinshi, for the same price. One of my best purchses in this sense was 西又葵 (Nishimata Aoi)'s Nocturne - a tome that really deserves the 'artbook' tag, even though I shelled the same price for it as I did for many 12-pages booklets.

Not my pic, but it gives a nice idea of the package

The main piece is a thick, sturdy 116-pages artbook: it's full color, and features mostly one page and two page spreads of Nishimata Aoi's artworks, with a whole section dedicated to her character design for Shuffle! (Navel). The hardcover is nice and solid, and it comes with a protective plastic case (top left in the pic). A few extra goods were thrown in: one of those fun anime phone cards that can be often bought and traded at cons (I wish I could start a collection of those, but must dōjin); a very high quality poster print of the cover illustration; and a shitajiki also featuring the cover image. The poster is now hanging on my bedroom's wall, mostly acting as chick repellent yet boosting my otaku cred off the charts. Whee.

One of my favorite pics from the arbook

Aoi Nishimata is not an artist I would usually go for: she is fairly established, has done loads of mainstream work and her illustrations don't have that edgy, artsy cred a stuck up a-hole like me thrives upon. I mean, I am an Abyukyo fan. Still, she has published (and, apparently, still publishes) loads of dōjin work through her JOKER TYPE vanity circle, usually artbooks packed with extra goods as with Nocturne. Unfortunately, they usually command higher prices than what I had to shell for this lucky buy, so I don't see myself acquiring any more of hers. She has also illustrated, and even written a few light novels apparently... but me and LNs are a whole different can of worms we'll open some other time.

AO NO EDEN by 椎名優

My intention was to review the wonderfully weird Alexander Calder's Sweetheart dōjinshi next, but I decided I actually need to do some proper research for that post - not only 平均律 is one of my favorite circles, but I'm also getting a new dōjinshi of his next week, so I'll be holding off for a while and maybe do a circle review rather than a single work review. So, this time, I'll instead present a book that sat in my wishlist for a while, until I could finally snag it for a honestly very good price: 椎名優 (Shiina You)'s Ao no Eden.

Shiina You is one of the many, many artists who dabble in dōjinshi while, at the same time, working as properly published manga authors (in case you read Italian, I have written a short blog piece for NipPop about the topic). Actually, her only proper manga credit seems to be モノクローム ミスト (Monochrome Myst), a very well drawn but fairly conventional mystery / fantasy series that I found quite unremarkable overall. I learnt, in time, that dōjinshi is usually the medium where excellent artists with no excellent writing skills give their best, so I finally got myself a copy of Ao no Eden - I wasn't disappointed.

The cover above probably won't impress you much, but first: it's actually a fairly deep blue and the writing is embossed and shiny (I probably was a magpie in my previous life); second: the cover is the only thing that's plain about this dōjinshi. Larger than A4, the book is extremely sturdy and in full color: production-wise, it's probably one of the best I own, and probably one of the few I would have shelled $15 for even if buying in Japan (when I was over there, the average seemed to be $4-5 for your typical, partially color dōjinshi).
We start off with a short, 12-page manga about a girl and an android boy by the seaside - the seaside of an apocalyptic wasteland. They are trying to fly a glider, things don't go as planned but the events will still manage to draw the two closer than before... yes, fairly standard manga dross, but the graphic style and the character design are beyond gorgeous.

 

The second part of the book follows a completely different structure: a series of AMAZING two-page spreads, each paired with a short story that tells (from what I could gather) the saga of how the wasteland and the two kids came to be, and where they end up eventually once adults. Being actual narration rather than manga, the Japanese of this second part is fairly difficult, quite wordy too so I could just browse for the general gist. The art is, however, top notch, and it really shines in large format.

 

 

There seems to be a few more dōjinshi from Shiina You floating around, even though it now seems her main gig is light novel illustration. One unfortunate thing I noticed is how quickly prices for dōjin inflate once the artist goes mainstream. so I probably better hurry...

Mind(less?) Fun

In the midst of the flurry of events in 2015 - NEETdom, renovating a three floor villa, turning 30 - one thing that somewhat surprised me is a slight but growing shift in my taste in entertainment. Until recently I used to be, more or less, a snob. I would only read big, over the top tomes (often halfway); I would only watch late night, essay films; the only cartoons I would sporadically watch was anime - and, even then, not unless it featured deep plots and refined, detailed art. Generally speaking, I would not consume any media that didn't scream 'craftmanship', 'philosophical depth' or 'adult taste' from the top of its lungs.

The taxing events of this past year marked a change in that. Probably because I was often simply too tired, but also because of the 'betrayal by culture' my difficulties in the academic world often felt like, more and more often I would pick up again and dust off those 'childish things' and find myself guiltlessly (and unironically) enjoying stuff I would have formerly branded as unsophisticated, or simply not worth my time. In other words, I began to see the appeal of simple, linear, well-crafted entertainment over convoluted, 'thinking man' bullshit.

Where I currently live I do not have limitless internet: one unintended but fun consequence of this is that I no longer stream films or shows; rather, I went back to the good old 'scour TV channels for reruns' and 'just turn the TV on and see what we got'. A nice change of pace, limited disposable bandwidth made me go back to the days of my youth, when catching the show I liked on TV was a daily, sometimes weekly rite that took careful planning of the day ahead. One of my favorite channels is Boing TV, where you can enjoy musty first seasons of shows that, abroad, have probably already ended: Adventure Time, Steven Universe, Gumball. Yes, I am lagging behind like hell, and I simply don't care. Maybe it'll change later this year, when I'll get satellite ADSL; maybe not.

Collating my newfound taste for mindless, silly entertainment with TV, one show I am actually liking is Yo Soy Franky, a ridiculously upbeat Colombian production where a robot girl shares her time between wacky family and wacky school antics, while hiding to the world she is a robot. Yes, it's silly and yes, that's what I would have rationalised a year ago: nowadays, I just sit down and enjoy the reassuringly formulaic plot and the eye-gougingly gaudy color schemes. I also enjoy supreme babe Danielle Arciniegas, but that's another story.

 

 

Same story with another ridiculously funny, pastel laden show I've been enjoying far more than I ever thought I would have: Every Witch Way, a show probably about witches but, I suspect, mostly a plotless excuse for ridiculous, laugh out loud romps into the land of surreal fun. Also, it features second supreme babe of the year Autumn Wendel, who I am fairly sure is no longer jailbait so it's ok - not to mention, she has a Lovecraft connection as she starred in 'The Whisperer in Darkness'.

 

Also, I sometimes stay up until 2am to watch Dofus. How low have I sunk.

Finally, here is a little sunset from my window. I must be the one person alive who's actually happy to be living next to a high speed train line. It also feels really nice for this blog to finally be about whatever the **** I feel like. Refreeeshing.

トンネル by 幻灯会

As I mentioned in my previous post (where I also explained why this formerly museology-leaning corner of the Web will not be turning to a 'whatever I feel like' personal blog), one of my big passions is dōjinshi (同人誌), a fancy word for amateur manga. Only after my first trip to Japan I have begun collecting, focusing exclusively on original (non-parody) works, mostly with an 'artsy' slant. If you're curious, I buy through Otaku Republic (very handy because they give you free priority shipping over $50 and, if you're not yet fluent in Japanese like me, they speak more than passable English); and this is my doujinshi.com 'wishlist'. Given that it's pretty much impossible to find any English-Language review of original, non-porn dōjinshi (one such place was Nattoli, but it seems more or less dead), I decided that part of this blog will now present reviews of dōjinshi from my collection, starting off with one that I am actually translating right now for Japanese practice.

School girl Kasumi, during her elementary school days, used to be part of a pack of kids with a - maybe - typical passion for the age: scouring industrial ruins in search for cheap thrills. A particularly popular haunt was an underpass, the setting for a special game: you had to run its whole length without looking back, otherwise... well, otherwise bad stuff would happen. Which ended up being the case with Kasumi's good friend, Yukiharu-kun: in a session of this childish dare, he simply never reached the other side. Kidnapping? mysterious disappearance? not even the police could find out but still, ten years later, Kasumi just can't let go...

トンネル (Tunnel) is a black and white, 36-page dōjinshi from circle 幻灯会 (Gentokai), released in 1999. Along with the titular story, it also includes a funny, slightly ecchi omake at the end. The circle itself consists of みずはらけんじ (Mizuhara Kenji) who seems to have done little to no work outside of this circle; and 鈴木がんま (Suzuki Ganma), who is also part of another circle, 三流倶楽部, that mostly deals in Sailor Moon porn and therefore does not concern us. Gentokai itself has no Internet page I could find, but a few other dōjinshi to its credit, none dating past 2004. I surmise the circle is, therefore, gone for good.

トンネル itself is fairly stripped-down as far as dōjinshi go: spine is glued but the paper is fairly lightweight. As you can see from the screenshot below, the art style is quite 'retro', shall we say, with more than a touch of 80s - 90s manga but a more than decent grasp of anatomy, perspective and shading: I usually tend to prefer hyper-modern styles, but nonetheless I found Gentokai's tract to have more than a bit of charm. The story itself is, after all, more nostalgic than scary - in spite of the subject matter. The Japanese used is fairly simple, no exceedingly difficult kanji aside from a couple of very text-thick pages. Nothing an intermediate can't grasp.

I admit this one was a lucky impulse buy - a strategy that seemed to work fairly well for me, so far. The dōjinshi is old by the medium's standards and probably difficult to find (though Otaku Rep seems to have a couple copies left): I'd scan it for all to see but I'm terrified of ruining the book. As this reviews was the first one merely out of convenience - the comic was literally laying on top of the pile - I will try to offer something a bit easier to find in our next outing.