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.