ふゆまん 3 by あきまん

 As the few followers of my blog might know, I'm very much a fan of 'wtf' moments. Still, there are times when the bar of weirdness gets raised a bit too high even for me...

ふゆまん 3 (yes, once again third in a series, sue me) is a short illustration collection by Akiman, whom you might be familiar with under their actual name: Akira Yasuda, the character designer who worked on a bunch of Capcom video games (Street Fighter, Final Fight), anime (Gundam, Code Geass) and a bunch of novel and magazine covers. Quite the pedigree, which once again goes to show how permeabile the dōjin - commercial separation can sometimes be. 

Dating back to 2008, ふゆまん 3 is a 44 pages mostly b&w collection, with a few color pages throw in at the beginning. It consists mostly of original material, specifically a number of sci-fi meets ecchi pinups drawn in the artist's signature style: thin linework, fairly soft colors by animanga standards, and an emphasis on impossibly slender battle ladies, whose armors look to be as heavy as them if not more. A 10 page full color section stands out, in which Akiman takes us step by step through the creation of a full color illustration... which, surprisingly, does not appear as a full-page illustration like the others do, only as thumbnails. Kind of a bizarre choice, but it's still nice to see an artist that actually lays his creative process bare: I feel it usually adds depth to 'simple' illustration collections, and it's certainly the case here.

Now, you might be wondering what the opening spiel about 'wft moments' had to do with this dōjinshi. Well, as I turned to the final pages of ふゆまん 3, I was greeted by... this.

Yup, they sure look like advertisements for fishmongers. Now, I think it's kinda cool that a self publication fosters local Hokkaido businesses... or is it the other way around? Still, fairly wft and random but something that I could see happen more in the future. After all, why self finance, when you can get sponsors? One can only wonder if they got a chance to preview Akiman's saucy pinups before signing the line...