SORA vol.2 by じぇん / MIDGARD by 廃墟探索部

This dōjinshi review takes a few cues from an article I wrote for the cultural association's NipPop web site in 2015. Most stuff you'll find in English on the dōjin universe tends to focus heavily on gender issues - interesting, but you can pick up any Mechademia issue and you've pretty much covered the subject for a lifetime. There's more than that...

Actually, an often overlooked aspect of dōjinshi is that some of them (admittedly, a vast minority) actually aren't manga at all. There is a growing group of dōjinka (同人家) who use the dōjinshi medium to explore more traditionally themed illustrations, or even photography. I'm not talking about cosplay photobooks, which thematically are more or less still anime; I'm thinking, for example, of some of Onuphoto's stuff, or Amaguri Irofu's pinups.

Even more interesting, at least to me, are those dōjinshi that simply forsake the human form, and instead focus on 'documentary' themes, such as landscape or architecture. While most dōjinshi from this subset tend to take the otaku approach of cataloguing, and the graphic aspect is secondary to the textual content (otaku manuals of sorts, one could say), other take a more aesthetic approach, turning landscape and architecture into art and coming full circle with the kind of stuff one would expect from a coffee table art book.

Today I am reviewing two very different examples of this kind of dōjinshi: SORA vol.2 by じぇん, and MIDGARD by 廃墟探索部.

廃墟探索部 is the circle of Inaba Wataru and Rei Narumiya(twitter: @inabawataru, website defunct), which doesn't seem to have produced much in the past two years, but has previously built a nice catalogue of dōjinshi centered on the world of 'kojo moe' - which is to say, exploration of industrial and urban ruins. There is, for example, a photo reportage from Chernobyl.

I have been hunting for a while for one of their dōjinshi, and I finally got the chance to snag a copy of MIDGARD (2010). Horizontal A4, full color on fairly thick laminated paper which unfotunately tends to crease and fold quite a bit. Look at the cover above, and that's all you need to know: night pictures of an industrial complex - which one we cannot say, as there is literally no text on this dōjinshi outside of title and credits. If anyone recognizes it, please do let me know.

 

Sounds underwhelming? well, it's really not, believe me. The factory becomes an excuse to paint with light and play with the more painterly aspects of photography, giving birth to two-page spreads of swirling lights and shadows, massive geometries and so on. The documentary aspect disappears, and we are left with pure aesthetics. The concept itself and the process are fascinating to me in their own right (and it would be interesting to see what kind of market a dōjinshi like this one might have), but the visual results are just as stunning.

 

 

Another interesting case of an unusual subject matter for a dōjinshi is 2009's SORA vol.2 by じぇん (who has a very seldom updated Pixiv and site). Vertical A4, full color, laminated paper and, sadly, a meager 12 pages. The subject? skies. More specifically, very very VERY photorealistic digital drawings of skies. I cannot overstate the skills of じぇん: there were times in which I had to do a double take, and still couldn't believe these weren't pictures.



Thoroughly badass. Also, I did look for SORA vol.1 but couldn't find it anywhere.

In a way, these kinds of dōjinshi are fairly difficult to review - aside from the hook of the theme and the gorgeous graphics, there is very little to comment upon. You might have to decide for yourself is pretty pictures are enough for you: as far as I'm concerned, these are two instances in which they more than are.

PASTA Holiday by Sayu Studio / TYPE and DAUGHTERS by Heikinritsu

Good news of the day - it's finally warm enough to start thinking about my vegetable garden: among others, I'm also going to try anise and see if I can get a good extract from it. Bad news of the day - day surgery sometime next month ;_; I'm dreading more the anaesthesia than the surgery itself.

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...

LOVE MARS by あびゅうきょ

The bad weather is finally dwindling down after a few fairly horrid weeks, and I was able to do some proper gardening - including relocation of a blueberry bush, and some preliminary work on my herb garden. If they told me ten years ago I would end up a self-sustaining farmer, I'd have laughed...

Also, I am aware there is such a thing as an anime spring season, which I couldn't care about for a variety of reasons: first of all, the last anime I legitimately enjoyed came out around 2011 or something, and I can't even remember what it was; then, as I no longer have unlimited internet connection, streaming is out of the question. No big deal really, as Man-Ga channel is currently airing two favorites of mine - Lodoss and Vampire Princess Miyu; and Every Witch Way easily tops any comedy show I have seen in the past two years. And and, that gigantic trainwreck that is Shannara is finally over, so we can bury its charred remains along with its Xena level looks, and forget it ever existed. I had half an idea of picking up the Shannara novels I had never read - Ilse Witch onward - but nope, not going to happen.

Also, one of the few things in which Shannara topped Tolkien is that the protagonists actually had the sense to use the bloody giant bird to save the day. Why didn't they use the bloody Roc in the adaptation? the cut makes the whole scene of rescuing the Elf rider literally useless.

Aaaanyway, enough ranting, and let's get back to the dōjinshi. One of my many impulse buys while I was over in Japan (three years ago? feels like a eternity) was this little A5 size, black and white dōjinshi from a circle I knew only in passing by name: LOVE MARS by あびゅうきょ工房 (Abyukyo Studio). I knew that the circle mostly dealt in gunji ota (military otaku), which I could care less for; and futanari, which is even worse not for the transgender angle, but because I find the idea of a cock and no balls very, very creepy. Fortunately I perused the dōjinshi (which, unusually, was actually unwrapped) and saw there was none of either, so I gave it a chance.

So why did I buy this thing in the first place, you ask? the absence of stuff I dislike usually would't be enough to shell my very hard-earned cash. Well, one thing that really struck me the first time I came across Abyukyo's web site was his very distinctive art stlye. It surely is... an acquired taste, to put it mildly: his grasp of human anatomy is fairly tenuous, and his girls hardly look like your average moe blob. Still, his incredibily detailed signature style is characterized by the visual accumulation of one particular after the other, and the result are rich and vivid panels that you could literally spend hours exploring for every tiny detail. His style actually reminds me a lot of early Riichi Ueshiba, Discommunication era.

Published in 2012, LOVE MARS is a fairly weird mock-up scientific record of the deployment of girl-shaped robots on Mars, so to fight phallic looking autoctonous fauna. No, Im'm not lying, this is actually what the dōjinshi is about. To be fair, I'm kind of hazy on the details, as I could only read excepts of this work: some images take up a whole page, while sometimes they will share space with verbose block of texts featuring very difficult kanji. Which makes sense, as it's supposed to have a 'science report' feel to it; still, reading wise it had to be relegated to the 'some day soon' pile.

The book itself is fairly well constructed. Sporting glued spine and a color cover (see above), it's printed on nice and sturdy paper with a pleasant yellowish shade; there are no visible printing defects, and the small format actually doesn't impair Abyukyo's taste for detail to any extent. I am actually starting to enjoy these smaller formats: I have some A3 dōjinshi that are currently collapsing under their own weight.

Overall, a lucky fortuitous purchase. It might not be for everyone, but it has that indie, edgy feel I sometimes need in order to compensate for all that redjuice stylishness.

Big (?) Haul

It's been raining nearly non-stop for a week over here, and it's starting to show - today I couldn't shower for fear of overflows, and my garden looks pretty much like the pond I have always wanted... minus the koi. It seems, however, as if an owl might have nested down the ventilation shaft of my bathroom, as ungodly screams were heard almost nightly.

On other news, I am sad to say that Yo Soy Franky, while not having jumped the shark yet, is already showing some fatigue: since the whole 'lab wars' deal has been dropped, it's become your average teenage soap opera, nothing remarkable really. The occasionally really hammy acting doesn't help too. On the other hand, Boing is now showing Every Witch Way's second season, and it's the first legitimately fun and funny thing I've seen on Tv in a while - even better than the first season. And maybe I'm chromatically challenged, but I really dig the show's aesthetics too.

It's alternatively neon madness and pastel hell, and I unironically love both.

On other other news, another shipment from the Land of the Rising Sun came in today! Only four dōjinshi, but some stuff I've actually been hunting for a long, long time. Publications by Sayu STUDIO are usually friggin' expensive, but I managed to snag their latest for an actually humane price - it was worth every cent. Also SORA vol. 2 from じぇん, pretty hard to find (even when I was over in Japan) and a very peculiar piece of art; another Heikinritsu for my collection; and an oddball I had on my dōjinshi.org wishlist for a while. Reviews will, of course, come along as time permits.

NipPop - English Version

As some may know, I sometimes write for NipPop.it, the web magazine of the Cultural Association NipPop, of which I am member. Mostly deals in Japanese pop culture, media, animanga and so on.

The site has now an English version, translated by yours truly. Lots of interesting stuff, unfortunately my articles on dōjinshi haven't been translated yet but I'll get around to it soon. In the meantime, you can check out the main page and see if something grabs your attention.

Also, NipPop organizes a big event in Bologna each year, with guests and workshops. I'll be of course attending and reviewing - might even live tweet it. Leiji Matsumoto will be there...

CHOCOLATE APPLE by CHOCOLATE SHOP

Ah, the pain... when you see a Heikinritsu dōjinshi on Yahoo Japan auctions, and your credit card shakes at the mere thought of the loopholes you'd have to get through just to have it shipped.

Anyway, while waiting for my March shipment (which does also include a Heikinritsu, albeit a different one), I wanted to spend a few words on a... peculiar dōjinshi, to say the least. Not as peculiar as that one by Natsume Ono about Italian politician Piero Fassino, but still pretty weird.

It's pretty hard to understate the cultural and social resonace that Steve Jobs had on our contemporary world: even setting aside the (vastly overrated) products by Apple, the man himself has become a sort of today's religious icon, towards which reverence (and rabid whiteknighting) is showered even long after credit should be due. A personality cult, basically - which I gladly do not partake in, but whatever.

 Now, I'm not a professor in Japanese sociology, so I can't comment on how widespread this cult is in Japan; but, on my 2013 trip to the country, inside the Akihabara Mandarake I happened upon a dōjinshi from a circle I had never heard before - a certain CHOCOLATE SHOP.

A dōjinshi tribute to Steve Jobs. It was, of course, swiftly bought amid the nonplussed disapproval of my tripmates - all typical Italian otaku, who think stuff like old school mecha and Devilman are actually good or relevant. Which reminds me, maybe I should write something someday about the various tics and peeves of Italian otaku.

Aaaanyway, CHOCOLATE SHOP's CHOCOLATE APPLE, the circle's tribute to Apple founder and flagship personality. Now, look at the cover and tell me what's wrong.

Yup. Genderbent Steve Jobs. And he's not the only one who gets moefied, there is also a sexy and bespectacled Bill Gates in there. CHOCOLATE SHOP (there is a site but it's dead) is a very prolific circle made up by head member CHOCO and a series of assistants. CHOCO (Mugitani Koichi) himself is a pro who has done some commercial work, and is seemingly known enough to warrant a Wikipedia page: among the others, character design for Chaos;Head and a manga series, イグナクロス零号駅. The CHOCOLATE SHOP circle itself publishes mostly character designs and NGE parodies, as well as the occasional oddball such as CHOCOLATE APPLE.

The dōjinshi is, in fact, mostly not about Steve Jobs, who is featured as a character just a few times through the B&W with color insert book. CHOCOLATE SHOP seems to be, instead, about CHOCO's thorough obsession with Apple products. Aside from a few pages of manga, this is a very wordy dōjinshi, with walls of text and lots of technical jargon that I couldn't parse at all. Which reminds me of how thoroughly complicated it can be, to read your own language filtered through an awkward systems such as katakana is.

There are highlights in the form of some very funny comedy, such as random slapstick violence against Macs or moe personifications of various Apple machines; as a whole, however, this work is graphically disappointing. Chibi abounds, and there is little room for CHOCO's sleek and stylish designs, which really is a shame.

What he usually does. オーメストグランデ自転車カタログ2044年夏版

 

Typical page from CHOCOLATE APPLE

 

 

 

Which I guess is fine, if we consider that I bought the dōjinshi mostly for laughs and weirdness value. It'll probably be also the only CHOCO dōjinshi I'll ever afford in paper form: as with most dōjinka who also do commercial work, prices are off the wall. Who knows, maybe someday..

CHOCO's twitter is @choco_mugi