My habit of buying stuff at random sometimes pays off big time (hello わかりま千円), sometimes it leaves me with some... very strange items. One of the strangest I have come across is short but 'expansive' dōjinshi by a circle going by the name NEDLOG (a Pixiv and a Twitter here), which seems to be a one (wo?)man show by a certain Fuumi, and specializes in what some people would kindly refer to as 'pretty gross stuff' - mostly guro, often with a hint of hentai (and futanari guro too. Brr). NEDLOG apparently also dabbles in Evangelion guro, but unfortunately there is none in the dōjinshi I have in my possession, 大臓器本弐ハートブレイク.
The tame cover belies grisly content. As the title suggests, this 'volume' focuses mostly on cardiac entrails as a concept, offering a gallery of moe-looking chicks opened up, dissected and taken apart in the most bizarre and fantastic ways.
Now, let's start off with the good points of this strange item I'm holding. It's full color, and the format is impressive: it must be at least an A3, which makes it hard to store away but a pleasure to hold in one's hand and leaf through. It's a format you actually don't see very often in the dōjinshi world, where A4 and smaller are the norm.
It's also reductive, I think, to look at something like this dōjinshi and discuss it as merely a guro show-off. Beside the perhaps not stellar, but crisp and lively character rendering - penalized by occasional pixelation at the edges - the 'volume' is a stunning piece of visual design: NEDLOG defnitely knows how to play with the juxtaposition of black and white, light and shadow, color and monochrome, and the result is a captivating visual structure that could hold its own even without its shock content. Occasionally, there are also visual hints of collage art reminescent of - well, I wish I could make a Dadaist art comparison, but what really comes to mind is a Carcass cover...
There are also a couple weak points, aside from the guro content - that will simply appeal to you or not, no questions asked. First, the 'volume' is THIN. Like, really thin. Barely twelve pages, counting the cover. It was also, I seem to remember, fairly expensive for its page count (it's one of those I bought in person while over in Japan). Overall, however, 大臓器本弐ハートブレイク is a solid work that definitely knows its genre and audience, and might appeal to you if you fall squarely into that fold. The circle produces new volumes regularly, but the latest few seem to have veered toward acid-colored futanari - not really my thing, I'm afraid...
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