"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.