ギルティごはん by COSMIC FORGE

 ... and it's thanks to a dōjinshi from this circle that I learned the Japanese word for 'normie'. What makes it even funnier is that jisho.org has 'normie' as an actual definition. Sign of the times...

A different dōjinshi, that is. I reviewed in the past a couple of works by COSMIC FORGE, all of them rather high-quality - glossy, full color, and fallign right into that 'bizarre, specific take on a narrow otaku interest' that I dig so much. This one is no exception - ギルティごはん, a 20 pages, full color work from 2015 is dedicated to showcasing a few places in the Tokyo area where you can have your fill of, as the title says, 'guilty pleasure' meals. 

This blog is not new to food-centric circles, as I happen to be a big fan of SAYU Studio's self-published books of recipes. This is the first time, however, that I got my hands on a restaurant-reviews dōjinshi, which I know to be a rather florid subset... I simply never bought one. Still, it's a purchase I don't regret, and not only because the publication itself is rather high quality - the pictures are nice and crisp, the descriptions and field reports clear and to the point, and the horiziontal layout really brings it all together in a 'magazine insert' kind of way. 

ギルティごはん also happens to be a time capsule of sort. As globetrotting foodies might know, restaurants and eateries in Japan, big cities especially, are very short lived; and, as far as I could research, none of the places reviewed here are still standing. I might be wrong, though, as my Japanese Google-fu has failed me before. 

So, yeah, not much to say beyond this. Still, a nice interesting read, especially relevant if you happen to be into this kind of stuff. There is a volume 2 available as well, though I'm not sure I'll bother buying it. We'll see...

着艦未満 by シギサワカヤ

 Sometimes we get pleasantly surprised, even in  the times of coronavirus. Be it the reduced airmail traffic, be it that print material packages tend to fly under the radar (in years of collecting I had to pay customs maybe once), I got in two weeks a Mandarake delivery that usually takes months. It's a mystery...

But! This also means that the blog is coming back to life, and reviews will pour forth once again. We're starting nice and easy with a dōjinshi by シギサワカヤ (Shigisawa Kaya), titled 着艦未満 , which translates to... insufficient landing strip? I'm not sure to be honest, as 着艦 is some kind of military navy term I'm not familiar with. However, as you might have guessed from this, the dōjinshi I'm reviewing is a KanColle parody, which I was not expecting... as this specific work is actually filed as 'original' on doujinshi.org. 

Now, as you might know, I'm not a fan of parody works. I'm also not a fan of KanColle, one of those otaku obsessions that really never stuck with me. On the other hand, I am a decently big fan of Shigisawa Kaya - if you're unfamiliar with the author, she usually dabbles in yuri romances between salarywomen, plus some forays into the sapphic supernatural. She doesn't have a huge catalog of commercial work, but she participates often in anthologies and used to put out a lot of dōjin works, especially in her early career. She has a very distinctive, simple and sometimes abstract graphic style that fits very well the kind of love stories she usually focuses on.

Gag manga based around anthropomorphizations of battleships? not so much. In fact, I'm afraid to say that this thin, 24 B&W pages booklet is really nothing special. The story is the usual gag where the battleship girl of the day (can't really be bothered figuring out which one it exactly is, I'm not that much of a weeb) fails to satisfy the commander in some way, feels but but is forgiven in the end. From what I read of KanColle dōjin works, that's pretty much a trope. The drawing style is Shigisawa's own, which is a plus, but really doesn't blend too well with this bland fan fiction. Or maybe I'm just shocked at the scandalous lack of yuri...

All in all, I can't really reccomend this dōjinshi, but I can reccomend Shigisawa Kaya - go get one of her commercial works, or the good dōjinshi, like ヴァーチャル・レッド.