SAILORBON by Various

In between the job hunting and taking care of my estate and dogs, one thing I'll be focusing on early 2019 is the first draft of a... young adult mystery novel. Yup, that's right. I've been selected as one of eleven participants to Il Battello a Vapore's A Caccia Di Storie, a residency that has spawned quite a few literary careers in the past few editions. Details on my story will be forthcoming (and we're actually forbidden to blog the details, from what I gather), but I've been reading a lot of New Orthodox mystery fiction lately, so...

New year, new dōjinshi review. Sailorbon is actually a group effort, featuring about 100 different artist and helmed by dōjinka 午前4時, ostensibly centered around a nautical theme - which is, surprisingly, largely followed by participants. Sure, considering the topic it'd be way too easy to cheat and simply draw a girl in a sailor suit (and some artists certainly do), but all is forgiven considering Sailorbon's overall quality. There is no clear low-hanging outlier, and all featured artists have done a very good job of providing a nice, on topic illustration, regardless of differences in style. Since reviewing every single illustration would probably overkill, I will focus on highlighting in no particular order a few of my favorites, and a few that stuck to the theme in ways that I found interesting.

I have mentioned before that, while I enjoy the very detailed and pseudo-realistic style a lot of Japanese artists seem to embrace, I al always very open to slightly more abstract visual choices. For example, I really dug  のすけ's playing with very simple basic colors, contrasting with the complex starry patterns.

On the other hand, artists such as ざいん choose instead to play with perspective, softer colors, and almost pastel-like coloring. Shōjo are, of course, the dominant subject in Pixiv-style illustration, and it's also the case with Sailorbon - I'm pretty sure every illustration that doesn't feature a cute girl features a cute boy...

The nautical theme offers a lot of interesting subjects to play with, and some do. ノナ offers us an extremely simple image, composition and coloring wise, counterbalanced by the awesome visual cues and melding of the pretty girl and sailor themes and iconography.

Just in case you thought I had something against pretty 2d girls, let me show you a snippet of 麦白子's offering - blonde on tan, yummy.

And finally, of course, there is no lack of troll pictures. Check out ケロ's pretty marinarette:

All in all,  an excellent collection of illustrations that really displays the variety of styles that can be found among the Pixiv community. The only faults, really, are the minuscule size of the book - barely an A6 size - and, as mentioned, some artists' lazy choice of simply putting a girl in a school uniform and call it a day. Faults that I am more than ready to forgive, given the overall quality of the illustrations within Sailorbon.