Ahh, the good, old early 2000 memes. Back then I still used to lurk 4chan's /jp/ and unsavory places as such, and I would occasionally come across yet another Damaged Goods , invariable accompanied by pics spam of a character know as 'Bikko', upon which denizens of /jp/ and GuroChan would spin endless fanfictions, of bot savory and NSFW varieties.
This was long before my interest in dōjinshi and before I learned some basic Japanese, a time when I mostly still focused on anime and manga in translation. This filtering of nearly unknown, minor characters such as Bikko fed my characteristic crave for obscure cultural detritus (remember, you are reading a blog about SFW, original content fanart from Japan, after all) and invariably enticed me to look for more.
The good news: in spite of mystification by part of /jp/'s frequenters, Bikko does actually have a source: she is a character by dōjinshi circle Romantic Fool, a nickname for illustrator Yoshida On. She is an amputee, plays guitar in a rock band, smokes cherry cigarettes and is overall your typical yankee girl, with a dash of that 'social reject Japan doesn't want you to know about' thing going on.
Bad news: the dōjinshi that feature her are, for the most part, expensive collector items - the very first one, Kesson Shōjo, is pretty much impossible to find. Stillm mostly out of curiosity and nostalgia, I was set on owning a tiny piece of Bikko history, and so here we have Corbelleria by Romantic Fool.
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A flimsy 20 b&w pages, save for the cover, only the first story features Bikko- chan, an 8-page slice of life showing her engaged in daily life activities: eating cheap yakiniku, arguing with her bandmates, gathering some wisdom from a burly Buddhist priest. Short and sort of unsubstantial but hey, finally it's Bikko straight from the source.
The second, even shorter story is a group of schoolgirls messing around in your typical shopping arcade, nothing special.
So yeah, as you can tell there isn't much to this booklet. It's really short and, while Yoshida On has a very nice, clean tract that belies professional work, this is more of a 'short burst of my own thing' packaged for publication. Still it is, in its own way, a tiny fragment of the history of Japanese pop culture in the West, therefore something I simply needed to have. Still satisfied, and Bikko is sort of cute in her own, messy way.
