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...