ハ短調 by HEIKINRITSU / 平均律

And the collection keep growing...

Sadly, my most recent shipment from the folks at Otaku Republic has been mysteriously delayed on the Japan side - which is unusual to say the least, as it contains no H material, and as far as I remember customs never even bothered checking my packages before. Should be here in a couple of days.

Fortunately, however, I had another shipment on its way, a single dōjinshi which I just had to fit into my monthly budget, since it happens to be an oldie from my favorite circle, HEIKINRITSU / 平均律. This one not only came in on time, but it also contained a complimentary pack of transparent covers. Pretty badass and useful, as I usually never bother to protect my purchases beyond shelving.

I reviewed this one-man show's work a bunch of times, so unless this is the first time you stumble here, you should be pretty familiar with the kind of stuff he does. While, on the surface, Heikinritsu seems to offer collections of somewhat traditional bishōjo illustrations, each dōjinshi has a cohesive conceptual core which ties it all together.

As the musically themed title suggests, ハ短調 (literally C Minor) is no exception. I'm not sure many people could convincingly pull off a bishōjo personification of one of Bach's fugues... The format is a B5, part of it is B&W, but the first four illustrations are in a wonderfully minimalist color, of which the cover above is a great example. Heikinritsu is a master at making blank backgrounds actually work in favor of the image's composition and balance, rather than against - they never come across as an easy copout, but instead constitute an integral part of the illustration's economy.

Crappy pic but I'm not going to bend my copy.

There are only two very minor gripes I have with ハ短調, which actually are shared by other works by Heikinritsu. The first one (which also explains why my reviews of this circle's work are very short compare to my fanboyish enthusiasm) is that it's really, really short. 24 pages overall, but this includes the front title and credits, so the actual illustration page count is a fair bit shorter.

The other aspect, which is actually more of a shortcoming on my side (I'm not very good with Japanese jargon) than a fault per se, is that Heikinritsu's dōjinshi are fairly packed with complex text, which sometimes overtakes the illustration it accompanies. It's an essential element of course, as the concept behind each book does need a bit of explaining to be fully grasped, but I can't help feel the balance is at times a bit off. This is, fortunately, not really the case with ハ短調: here, the text explanations are treated as part of the image's composition, rather than merely as explanation tags or footnotes.

These are both incredibly minor complaints, which I mostly put down so I wouldn't come across as a total fanboy. Heikinritsu is by far my favorite circle, and the work it delivers is consistently engaging - especially if you are into math and procedural graphics, I suggest you check out アルゴリズミック・ビューティ. 

FLOWER vol. 1 - 10 by D.K.

While waiting for my most recent purchases to arrive (which include some VERY underground stuff, even by dōjinshi standards, and a very very vintage Heikinritsu), I will try and keep the blog warm by spending a few words on a series of illustration dōjinshi which were actually among the first I bought, during my trip to Japan way back in 2013. There, in Nakano's Mandarake, I got my hands on issues 1 through 10 of FLOWERS, by illustrator D.K.

What's interesting is that, in fact, a few illustrations from this series have appeared in an official, English language publication too. In 2008, Del Rey published a grand total of two issues of famous Japanese pop lit magazine FAUST, featuring a lot of big names like NISIOISIN, Kouhei Kadono, Kinoko Nasu; and a short story by Tatsuhiko Takimoto, the famous author of Welcome to the NHK. This story's illustrations, by D.K., also appear on FLOWERS vol 4.

While today - at least judging from his most recent works - he seems to dabble more in 3D CGI than anything else, the issues of FLOWERS I have, ranging between 2004 and 2008 (though an omnibus came out in 2012), are fairly traditional collections of bishojo and action illustrations and pin-ups; as well as selections from the character designs he did for series like Nier, Casshern and Kamisama no Puzzle. Each book is fairly thin, around 20 pages; some are full color, some B&W, some split.

D.K. has a very recognizable style, focused on complex poses and facial expressions, which really shows his professional background as a character designer. This is, like often happens in such works, a double edged blade: as there is little to no story or context to the pinups, the whole 'weight' of the dōjinshi rests on the the appeal of the illustrator's skills and virtuosism. This is not inherently a fault, but it definitely makes the work somewhat repetitive, especially considering that D.K. never strays at all from a handful of themes: fighting girls, robots, a few monsters here and there. This criticism, I readily admit, might also be part of a shift in my own tastes - I used to love illustration collections, then I discovered Pixiv, and now I mostly buy dōjinshi manga and novels. Additionally, some padding is provided by illustrations that appear in more than an issue, in color and B&W versions.

All in all, an excellent collection of pinups, but also a marker of my shifting tastes. It's unlikely that I would buy a whole series like that nowadays - and, in fact, I find D.K. newer, more thematically complex stuff far more enticing. You can try out for yourself the excellent web browser game Aragai, for example.