ひと、さらう風の by キトス / 鉄塔惑星 by Strawberry*kick / よしづきくみち短編集君と僕のアシアト by よしづきくみち

Top spots on my current wishlist: something by Kamo (which I've been wanting for a while) and some more Abyukyo. I have also begun using Mandarake for shopping, which has been an... interesting experience. Nothing wrong on the shop's side of things (by the way, save yourself a headache and order only from their Sahra shop), but my courier charged me 21 euros in custom fees, waited for me to pay them, then canceled them and made me wait weeks for a refund. What gives...

Anyway... while waiting for my latest shipment, I figured I'd keep this blog (barely) alive with a little review roundup of things that are either so flimsy page count-wise, or so obscure they probably don't need their own post. Two of them were random purchases, while another was something I had my eyes on for a while.

Sorry, but this is all you get. No pics online and I'm
still too afraid to scan my stuff...

So, first in line is ひと、さらう風の by キトス (2011), one of those dōjinshi I bought on their striking cover alone. I'm a sucker for subdued palettes and oil pastels aesthetics, not to mention the slice of life, Urushibara vibe the cover channeled. The joy and pain of dōjinshi is, of course, that most online shops won't let you see any of the inner pages, which can lead to some interesting surprises. Who could have guessed that, behind the peaceful cover, was a depressing story of wartime murder, drawn in a a visually aggressive style that wouldn't be out of place in ガロ? A woman fighter tries to save a child; yet, her gentleness is not repaid in kind, and the violence of war eventually has its way.
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised, as you don't often see dōjinshi tackling themes beyond cute chicks and summer days, and it's nice that someone still feels the urge to push the envelope a bit content-wise.

Moving on, 鉄塔惑星 by Strawberry*kick (2014). Another one I bought just for the cover, but at least this time I had a few pics of inner pages to justify my purchase. Another thing I've always been a sucker for are slice of life stories set in bizarre, contrieved worlds - and it doesn't get any more bizarre and contrived than a world where people live on power lines, and move from one pole to the other on wind bicycles. The story.... well, there really isn't one. Two young girls meet up, while their bikes are taken care of by a repair shop in the sky. Yeah. The visual style, on the other hand, is pretty impressive, cutesy but with a hand-drawn edge that makes it pleasantly busy, without feeling too hasty, or too alternative for its own good.

My copy is the dōjin one, and lacks all that YJC coterie.

Then, rounding up, a name some might actually be familiar with. よしづきくみち is a fairly well known mangaka in the West, as her manga have been both translated, and adapted as anime. Like often happens with people who eventually make the switch to commercial, she actually had her start (and still dabbles) in dōjinshi, including a hilarious split with とよ田みのる I plan on buying someday. The one I got, よしづきくみち短編集君と僕のアシアト , is a more mundane collection of short stories in the vein of her commercial output - slightly sappy, feelgood slice of life where friends discover friendship, young lovers discover love, and so on. As I'm faster and faster gravitating towards the more bizarre edge of dōjin, maybe this kind of stuff is just starting to feel a bit unadventurous. Visually, of course, it's Yoshizuki all the way: polished, very clean lines, with a strong 'commercial' feel to it - in a good way, fortunately. If you want to snag a copy, you're in luck: from what I could gather, this was also eventually reprinted as a digital release by Jump Comics.

So yes, some good stuff to fill in the blanks before the next haul. As always, feel free to friend me on Twitter, where I do most of my stuff nowadays.