AKAZUKINCHAN あかずきんちゃん 増刷版!! by モクタン / TOEKOMST by Ward

Yes yes, long time since my last update (save a farewell post I regretted pretty quick). One of the reasons is that my purchase schedule had become quite erratic, so I had very little material to actually review. Fortunately, I might FINALLY actually have a day job soon, so I might be able to indulge once again in what's pretty much my only vice - buying doujin.

For now, quick reviews of two standouts I bought recently. The first one is AKAZUKINCHAN by モクタン, member (along with fellow artist Sei Umehara) of the circle Wonderworld Studio. As one can see from the circle's web site, Wonderworld Studio is all about stylish, high contrast visual work, both in manga form, and of the purely illustrative variety (including some professional output). I actually strongly suggest checking out the web site, since (unusual for doujin artists) there is a lot of freely available material there.

AKAZUKINCHAN, as the title suggests, is a modern retelling of the well known Red Riding Hood fable, where the titular girl becomes a busy big city errand girl, and the wolf a metropolitan hipster. I personally never cared much for fables and retellings of them, so I was in it merely for the visual aspect, which is nothing short of stunning: モクタン has an amazing eye for design, and actually uses to their advantage the powerful constrasts that black and white can create. His style reminded me, at times, of big names like Kumeta, or Sayman. Definitely an artist to keep an eye on, if you're into very anti-moe, contemporary stuff.

Another standout purchase was one of my favorite kinds of doujinshi, a multi-artist illustration collection - the weirdly titled TOEKOMST ('future' in Dutch, or so Google tells me), which packs into a mere 24 color pages no less than nine (!) artists: Ward, Marthe, Tonomura, Tetsuya, Dan, Kaji, Tuchiyama, Wawon. Unfortunately, and this is big peeve of mine with some doujinshi, there is no bio or info page for any of the artists, who also have such commonplace names that it took some supreme Google-fu to track down some info on them (on a Deviantart page, of all places! feel free to explore).

Some of the artists, like the Japan residents Marthe and Ward, actually have some pretty high profile professional work under their belt, a recognition they definitely deserve. The art book in general is of a fairly high quality, to the point that none of the artists really stand out as a weak link: from Tetsuya's mechanical sci-fi concept art, to Tsuchiyama's tongue in cheek moepunk, every one of them manages to grab one's attention in spite of having only three pages or less to themselves. I was particularly impressed by Wawon's supremely intricate art style, so warm and glowy it almost approached traditional media.