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