Acqua - Pianeta by 結布

Warning: cover aside, the images in this review are NOT of the actual reviewed item. There are none online, and the volume is so tightly bound scanning or photographing would actually require tearing it apart. So, yeah, enjoy some unrelated eye candy!

Lately I've been trying to shift more of my (meagre) Japanese practice into actual reading and listening. NHK takes care of the former (everything still pretty much sounds like a jumble of 'u' sounds), while the former is mostly done through manga, though I've begun to tackle bits and pieces of novels here and there.

One of the best manga I have read in its original language so far is Acqua-Pianeta (awesome Itarian title by the way) by 結布, of who I had read before the excellent ゆかりちゃん, though this time around Yuu is in charge of the story, as well as the artwork.

I admit that most of my reasons to like Acqua-Pianeta boil down to the fact that I simply love slice of life, nothing-happens postapocalyptic (is eupostapocapyptic actually a word, or just an oxymoron?) stories in the vein of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, and that's pretty much a requirement for enjoying Yu's single volume story of people stranded on a flooded, yet surprisingly peaceful future Earth: if you expect things to actually happen, you're out of luck. The biggest adventure our girls face - yes, all of the co-protagonists are girls - is finding an old sign pointing to a long collapsed Tokyo Sky Tree. The rest of the time they go to school, fish, attend some singing practice, et cetera. The backstory on what happened to Earth is barely touched upon - apparently most of people have moved to Mars - but, honestly, that's not really the point of this manga to begin with, so all's forgiven.

The artwork, on the other hand, is all but ordinary. In full color, Yu has a painterly style that is nothing short of amazing: landscapes are rendered in a technique that almost borders into watercolors, and the anatomy and layout of each scene is invariably spot-on. She has a special flair for spanning, full -page scenes that do away with frames, letting the manga approach illustration territory.

So yes, very good stuff. I understand her most recent work is some kind of Yami no Moribito adapatation, which I'll be sure to pick up as I really enjoyed the novels too.

Benigyokozui vol.37 by Carnelian / Yggdrasity by Soji Hisakata / Furu Machi by Yoshitoshi ABe

Triple review today because, honestly, there just isn't enough meat around these bones to flesh out a full review for each dōjinshi... one of the downsides of the medium is that, more often than not, if you're buying blind (which, even with extensive online research, is almost always the case when purchasing from abroad) you'll find yourself with brochure-sized publications that, if you're lucky, won't be a mere collection of rough black-and-white sketches...

Let's start from the best one of the three. Yggdrasity by Soji Hisakata (2011) is a very, very thin illustration collection, clocking in at a mere 20 pages... but hey, at least it's on glossy paper, and full color! He seems to be one from that score of Japanese illustrators that mostly live off working in the fantasy light novels / trading cards / magazines genre - he also has a page on 100 Masters of Bishojo Painting - and the fare displayed in Yggdrasity (what the title might be trying to convey... your guess is as good as mine) seems to confirm this. There are a couple of bizarre exceptions, such as a scene from Dante's Purgatory (yeah, that Dante); and a few action pieces dedicated to Greek mythology. Little criticism can be moved from a visual point of view: Hisakata clearly knows his way around digital painting, and his handling of color and composition puts him squarely into professional 'commercial' territory. The competition is fierce, and probably something more needs to be done to stand out, but for some this might be more than enough.

On the other hand, Benigyokozui [?] by Carnelian, fails to deliver in spite of being also on glossy paper, also full color, and a tiny bit thicker too - about 30 pages. I'm clearly in the minority in my assessment, as this is nothing less than the 37th volume put out by this circle...
A big, big whammy for me was the strange, inxplicable decision to publish each illustration twice: for each two-page spread we have the illustration - usually competently, but not amazingly portrayed shōjo - on one page; and, on the adjacent one, the same illustration about twice enlarged. Carnelian's pinups are not particularly full of details that might require magnification, so this poor choice really feels like padding. We end up with more pages, but fewer illustrations than Soji Hisakata's...

Finally, Furu Machi, one of Yoshitoshi ABe's earliest dōjinshi (1995, the colophon tells me). Now, I love ABe, or at least I used to before he descended into the KanColle / slice of life pit he still seems to partially reside into, so I was thrilled to get my hands on such a visual relic... which turned out to be quite disappointing. The rough paper is not a problem for me, I actually prefer it to glossy paper as the grain enhances ABe's wavy, sometimes sketchy tract. But the contents are quite disappointing: after a few (about 10 pages) tiny, literally two-inches-wide color illustrations - now, here we could have used some magnification! - we are graced to page after page of characters sketches, with little to no background or explanation given (I ranted about this before). We are also graced with a mock-up of ABe's web site, for no apparent reason. Visually, well... humble beginnings, certainly, and the style displayed in Furu Machi is hardly representative of what ABe's style was, even as early as Serial Experiments Lain. 

Overall, a mild surprise and two disappointments. Fortunately, my next review will focus on one of the best purchases I have ever made, so stay tuned...