"Shiny Ad Catalogue" by estroitia

I must admit I am almost entirely unfamiliar with the Idolmaster thing - as much of a weeb as I am, I also am entirely uninterested in the world of Japanese idols; a trait I apparently don't share with many dōjin creators, as Idolmaster paraphernalia is pretty much everywhere.

I occasionally grumble when (mostly by fault of my poor observation skills) I buy a dōjinshi which turns out to be Idolmaster crap, but there is a silver lining to the cloud, as I have already happened twice upon works that, in spite of belonging to this dreadful fandom, actually happened to be excellent on their own merit. Shiny Ad Catalogue (dating 2021) is one such cases (the other I might review at some point in the future).

 
The first, curious feature of Shiny Ad Catalogue is that the circle that produced it, "estroitia", does not seem to be entirely Japanese. While the dōjinshi itself is in Japanese, according to their website estroitia is in fact a Chinese circle, which operates and distributes through both Chinese and Japanese channels and conventions. Biographies are rather succinct, so I can't really say whether the circle's members, 夕語 and ホシノフラワー, are both Chinese using aliases, or otherwise. Pretty cool stuff either way.

 

The dōjinshi illustration book itself is pretty cool too. At 24 pages full color and A4 format, it uses one of those pseudo-meta conceits I love so much in dōjin works: it presents its illustrations as a collection of ads for fictional products, endorsed by a variety of Idolmaster chicks. The book is a collaborative work, coordinated by the circle's two main members: it actually features illustrations by nineteen different artists, both Chinese and Japanese.


First of all, let's get out of the way that the pin-ups might as well be no Idolmaster idols at all, for allthat it matters: I'm sure some series nerd could identify each one of them based on hairstyle and such; but, to the ends of the collection, the could just be any pretty bishoujo really. Fidelity to the ad format is uneven: while some illustrations are basically just pinups, barely featuring the product, some could easily pass for actual anime-styled ads as I often saw in my time in Tokyo and Kyoto. Standouts, in this sense, are KRR's ad for a fictional job search website, or reguai's moody ad for fictional brand of candy "Kujira". To be honest, the quality of the featured work is pretty high in general, even when the meta conceit is just an excuse for drawing a pretty girl (ie エビフライ眼鏡P's sneaker ad).




Overall a very nice collection, not exceedingly tarnished by the Idolmaster connection. It also happens to be the second in a series, so I'll definitely have to get my hands on the next one.

"Useless beauty" by OKAMA

 I was really hoping to get more than one review in for November, especially since I have some backlog now, but technical difficulties prevented that. So, here we are in December...

But a good one it is. Some of you might still be familiar with the name OKAMA - he is not exclusively a dōjin artist, but has in fact authored a number of mainstream manga series, to some success and varying degrees of subjective quality. I read Cloth Road a long time ago and found it quite enjoyable as a take on the tournament-battle manga theme; I tried Mukan no Kishi and it was middling. 

He has a couple other minor series under his belt, but honestly with OKAMA story and worldbuilding is not where it's at. His strength, in my opinion, lies fair and square in the realm of character design, where he excels and then some. I think a cursory look at his personal site, linked above, will make that pretty clear.

What we have here today is Useless Beauty, a full-color collection dating all the way back to 2007 (17 years ago!), a bygone era in which OKAMA still dabbled almost entirely into pinups and, occasionally, ecchi and hentai. None of that here, as usual, but there are a couple slightly risqué phisiques here and there. 

What's really on display, even this early in OKAMA's career, is his eye for composition, color usage, and design. Sure, he almost entirely focuses on the usual bishoujo we have seen a thousand times before, but he does so with an imaginative flair we don't see everyday: his girls explore the Pole, commandeer ships in space, improvise tropical banquets and play with each other (more or less innocently) in a sort of virtual harem which puts on display, as the title suggests, the inherently useless - and therefore worthy of treasuring - quality of beauty. 

His eye for color is amazing and, frankly, very daring: there is something almost Murakami-like in the pop appeal of OKAMA's lime greens, neon pinks, often pitted against stark white. His figures, dramatically lithe yet always anatomically appropriate (occasionally breasts aside), bend and curve as if they were pieces of design themselves. JP pop art meets art nouveau.

OKAMA has published a couple other very good dōjinshi, some of which were translated ages ago by a long-dead scanlation group (shoutout to The Rabbit Reich): personally I recommend Fruit Girls and Okamarble. He also appeared in a couple issues of Murata's ROBOT.