マジカルガール・オルタナティヴ by 平均律 / 東京胡同案内(価格改定版) by ヘリオトロープ

A slightly steadier influx of cash means more dōjinshi right in my mailbox! Truth to be told, aside for a WoW subscription and the occasional belt sushi, that's pretty much all I spend my entertainment on - I'm a library aficionado, and rarely if ever watch movies. This month's special because I managed to get my hands on yet another book by my favorite 平均律, which actually leaves only one more dōjinshi from him before I complete my collection... along with that, I also got a nice little thing by ヘリオトロープ, one of those rare circles that completely forsake animanga , and instead use the dōjin as a display for more 'traditional' art forms such as photography.

But let's go in order. マジカルガール・オルタナティヴ is a mostly b&w, 28 pages work by 平均律, whom I have reviewed several times on this blog. It came out in 2005, meaning - because yes, I know what you're thinking - it predates Madoka Magika by quite a few years. The theme is, however, somewhat similar: contemporary-styled magical girls, in a sort of 'profile bio' format. The dōjinshi is, as usual, fairly verbose, and there is actually more to read than there is to see: the magical girls' designs are fairly interesting and curious, but they are usually dwarfed by the mass of text on every page. The 'theme' also feels slightly less engaging than usual, perhaps because it's somewhat more typically dōjin, unlike Heikinritsu's latter stuff, where the theme is a certain aesthetic or artistic procedure. All in all a decent product, but it definitely shows how far he's come, more than anything else.

東京胡同案内(価格改定版) is, from what I could gather from the credits, is a 2011 collaborative effort between jack-poy film, ketch+, and ヘリオトロープ (web presence defunct). It's a very small booklet, 12 pages of a narrow, tall A5 format; but it's full color and, visually, quite impressive. It's a sort of prose poem (atrocious Engrish translation provided), which really doesn't add much to the amazing background pictures of Tokyo's seediest angles that really are the centerpiece of 東京胡同案内. Dark yet hypersaturated, super-sharp and bizzarrely angled, the dōjinshi's creators offer a visual treat that is really unlike most kojo moe-like doujins. The city takes a msyterious, ethereal-like atmosphere, which falls in line with ヘリオトロープ's take on their most common subjects - usually ruins and the like.

This was half the purchase of this month. I will discuss the remaining two in a later post, for different reasons (I could not find anything on the author of The Favorite One; and the other is a bizarre uni otaku-club report or something like that. More reading is required...)