花と砂糖と君が好き by 乙女サバ

花と砂糖と君が好き (I love flowers and sugar) by 乙女サバ is  actually not a single dōjinshi, but a series of six that I've been trying to hunt down in its entirety for the past year or so: I managed to get 1, 4, and 6 so far, as the series has concluded a while ago and, as often happens with dōjinshi, back catalog is tight.

While the first volume was one of my many, many impulse purchases, it also proved to be a fortuitous one: Otome Saba's ongoing series about the misadventures of high school students Sayuu and her friend / foil Kanae is not only charming and very well drawn, with a rough yet peculiarly kawaii art style: it's also fairly simple linguistically, as it uses very little slang, so I've been using it for Japanese practice.

The story is a typical slice of life / fantastic realism piece. Sayuu, a cheerful but perennially dieting high schooler, has a tendency to get lost in daydreaming; while her classmate Kanae is a silent beauty whose gruff demeanor belies her great maturity. In each volume, Sayuu get excessively excited or nervous about something, be it her excessive weight, her plans for the future, or whether she is friendly enough to those around her. Sayuu's hyperactivity then crashes against Kanae's blasé attitude to pretty much everything, sending poor Sayuu into a spiral of self-reflection which takes the form of a daydream sequence - she might find herself climbing an endless staircase when faced with questions about her career choice, and so on. Through the insights of these 'fantastic realist' situations she then understand what needs to be done to overcome her own fears, and usually move a step forward in her more than slightly yuri relationship with Kanae.

The dōjinshi themselves are b&w, but feature very distinctly colored covers with a kind of cout-out lacy border that really adds a touch of charm. Saba's tract is somewhat sketchy, with a few anatomical difficulties here and there, but overall a very good balance between almost chibi cuteness and actual anthropomorphic proportions. There is a vague ongoing story but, overall, each volume can be taken as a stand-alone, as there are really only a handful of characters and their relationships are fairly stereotypical (a few of the volumes feature two of Kane and Sayuu's teachers, as well as a couple of their classmates).

The additional good news is that, on Saba's Pixiv, you can actually read all of the series in its entirety! Which really underlines what a fantastic thing Pixiv is for people like me, always on the hunt for that circle's web site or that dōjinka's long lost works. If then, you want to see more of her work, you can also check out her web 1.0-tastic page.

From the Vault: 'Dōjinshi: Japanese Amateur Manga and its Postmodern Characteristics'

As I was digging through old files, I found this... my Msc thesis on dōjinshi and postmodernity. It's me a bunch of years ago, so take it with a grain of salt; still, I think it discusses a few interesting points nonetheless, and no shit is too monor regardless.

You can find it here.

ボドニとあかいユーロセル by 平均律 / HEIKINRITSU

In the latest batch of dōjinshi arrivals, which you can see here (I know, not the most impressive haul ever but I'm afraid it's going to be like that for a while), I also managed to grab a copy of Heikinritsu's most recent product, the mysteriously titled ボドニとあかいユーロセル, aka Bodoni and the Red Eurocel. What could possibily bring together these two Italian (just like me!) inventions, an elegant font and a red (actually more of a neon pink) masking tape? It's Heikinritsu, so there can only be one answer... yes, high concept too. But I meant the shōjo. The shōjo!

Fifteen pages, stapled, fairly solid matte paper, of course full color - which is to say, b&w and red Eurocel. The format, an A5, is actually fairly small compared to other dōjinshi by Heikiritsu, usually a ful A4. This is not particularly bothersome, since his sparse and somewhat abstract style doesn't really suffer from the reduced magnification of the smaller format. Another interesting thing is that, compared again to the rest of his oeuvre, Eurocel has really toned down the verbal aspect: gone are the long blurbs of most of his previous works, and aside from a short afterword, it's all illustrations from top to bottom.

This dōjinshi could be easily seen as a pendant to Parametric as the two have a lot of things in common: they both present a graphical idea, or concept, that remains constant throughout the work; they both completely forsake backgrounds, in favor of an abstract and essential approach that fully focuses on the girl and the concept; and, in both cases, the girls are pretty damn moe. 

Unlike the mathemathically thick processes of Parametric, Bodoni's concept is fairly simple: girls interacting with an array of items, structures and situations created by simply piling up layers of Eurocel on the page. A girl peers through a hole in the tape; a runner bends down on the Eurocel starting line; there is even a girl having to deal with the distressing situation of having her bag explode with pink tape.

The concept, while of course not completely unheard of, is endearing and is carried on consistently thoughout the book: one might not be a sucker for Heikinritsu's style, unlike me, but the man's inventiveness cannot be denied. As already noted in the preceeding Parametric, the drawing skills have also vastly improved: the tract is less sketchy and is now cleaner, anatomy is more consistent, and finally feet are drawn as they should be.

This might not be my favorite Heikiritsu (that honor goes to Alexander Calder's Sweetheart), but pretty damn close. I'm really digging the direction his work is going, and I'm looking forward to what's to come next. Sadly, until he comes out with something new this is also going to be my last Heikinritsu purchase, as everything else by him seems to be unavailable everywhere...

New Arrivals - July

A fairly small haul this month, since funds have been particularly tight - still, a couple of items long overdue are now off my wishlist.

Main piece is, of course, ボドニとあかいユーロセル (Bodoni and the Red Eurocel) by my perennial favorite 平均律 / HEIKINRITSU, his latest and one of his best: a review could come as early as this evening. Four Sister’s ＆ Tea House Story 4 comes from Akira Kazumiya's 世緋亜・摸細工 circle, I jsut rifled through it but the art style is very cute and the book is actually fairly packed for being a mere 36 pages. Last is ルーチカ図鑑 天体観測 by ルーチカ, a non-fiction dōjinshi that was probably the weakest purchase of the lot, mostly due to its very tiny size and pagecount.

FRAGMENT by 白樺兎師春

Let me preface this by coming clean: I hate, hate, HATE furry, anthro, and anything that has to do with it. It's an instinctual, visceral kind of hate - which is both strange and logical, in a way, when you consider I'm a big animal lover. I systematically avoid anything that has to do with anthro and furry, Western or otherwise, and would actually rank it lower than loli and guro. Enuff said.

I was, therefore, very disappointed when I unpacked a copy of Shirakaba Toshiharu's Fragment, a fairly thick book of the artist's pencil sketches between 2001 and 2004. I must admit that disappointment was partially my fault: being one of the few purchases I actually didn't over-research, therefore didn't realize that Shirakaba Toshiharu is mostly known for his anthro art - which, to his credit, is actually very good (here is the Pixiv), as well as his children's illustrated books. I really liked the cover and the page count was high, so I just went for it.

The book is roughly 100 pages (unnumbered), pencil on a fairly thick, brown paper, glued spine. Aside from a very short closing note, the whole publication consists of unsorted, small sketches, usually six or seven per page. Almost all sketches depict a variety of anthropomorfic woodland creatures in forested environments: they are, as the title suggests, fragments, and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to the ordering. While this gives the book almost the feel of an actual sketchbook, it also encourages dispersion: many of the sketches look all exactly the same, and the eye tends to wander after a while. You decide if these points are a plus or a minus.

The real problem lies elsewhere. While it's been a long and honored tradition for artists to share their sketchbooks with the rest of the world (think Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo), they are not always fair, indicative deptictions of what the 'actual' art looks like. There are degrees of separation; and, personally, I like sketches that possess a nugget of what the artist's full pieces look like.

The fact is, Toshiharu's best rendered artwork scarcely resembles his sketches (and I'm not talking about degress of completion, I'm talking about arrangement, construction, depth and chiaroscuro); but it also rarely includes furry or anthro. Consider this, for example:

 It's in color, it has great depth and ana almost monumental composition, and it features no furry. It disregards his anthro art's mostly whimsical nature, trading it for a far more convincing arcane, mysterious aura.

The final result being, hand't I bothered digging around a bit, I would have simply assumed Shirakaba Toshiharu to be a middle-of-the-pack furry artist; while he is, actually, a multilayered and evocative artist whose work is very reminescent of European Magical Realism (Fuchs, Poumeyrol, etc.).

Concluding, the thing is: had I been the artist, maybe I wouldn't have released this sketchbook. It doesn't really give us much regarding the artist's process, and it doesn't represent fairly Toshiharu's oeuvre. Then again, who knows? I haven't found a mention of FRAGMENT on the artist's web site, so maybe he just nuked his early stuff from history once he went pro, like many other dōjinka do.