"Organica" by Garuku

 Final post of the year! So, I found out yesterday that Italy has passed a law that will dictate additional custom fees on all items from China and Japan... only a few euros, fortunately, but I put in a huge order with Mandarake for good measure. An order that includes my first ever piece of paraphernalia... pics will follow as soon as it gets here. Lul.

In the meantime, let's take a quick look at Organica: music and girls, am A4, full color, 16 pages illustrations collection from 2014 by Garuku, an artist that I'm not ashamed to admit I had never heard before coming across their excellent illustrations on PIXIV. They have a very polished, detailed style that really feels at home on the platform, and seems well suited for light novels covers and video game art / character design... which, according to their bio, is exactly what they do.

This, by now, more than a decade old offering is very much in line with the artist's more recent output. Focusing on illustrations that put together the two excellent themes of girls and music (be it listening to music, musical instruments or else), Garuku crafts a series of brilliant full-page illustrations, which conjugate sharp character designs with, at time, almost painterly detailing and coloring: they are clearly a master of composition and digital brushwork. The illustrations are all pinups, but with enough variety of angles and layouts to keep it interesting. The girls are also very, very cute, which helps.

Not much more to say, I guess. A very pleasant showcase by yet another excellent illustrator / concept artist that I was not familiar with. It's a bit slim, perhaps, but still within dōjin standards. Recommended. 

"鉄さび探検隊" by Hayashi Isao / Nagase Yosuke / Asato Mizu

 Gotta love when the name of an obscure doujinshi from 2013 shares a name with some sort of bizarre entertainment / event agency... I'm a sucker for strange rabbit holes but I think I won't be wasting my time with this one XD

Instead, I'll introduce 鉄さび探検隊 (literally 'Iron Rust Exploration Team'), a 24 pages, B&W, A4 collection of short manga stories plus assorted paraphernalia by three different authors - Hayashi Isao, Nagase Yosuke, and Asato Mizu. Self-proclaimed 'photography and animation aficionados' (aka your typical Japanese old-school otaku), they each present their own, stand alone manga, beefed up by omake, random commentary and whatnot.

 Hayashi Isao's contribution is a sort of illustrated travelogue of a trip around Okunoshima, an island well known for its population of semi-feral rabbits and storied involvement in the Sino-Japanese war (it includes a 'poison gas museum'...), complete with moe anthropomorphizations of wartime landmarks, and obligatory onsen pit stop. Ah, the island also features the tallest power lin pylon in Japan, if like me you're into this kind of stuff. 

Nagase Yosuke offers some sort of Junji Ito-esque short horror manga. A high school kid, along with his friends, is ejìnjoying a sport of urbex in the ruins of some sort of industrial facility, when he comes across a parasite that soon takes hold of his friends, zombie-style - an infection that makes them super thirsty for Capri-Sun, of all things. Unless, of course, he dreamed up the whole thing... the story is only a few pages and fairly insubstantial; mostly, I suspect, an excuse for the 'photography aficionado' to showcase a few pretty cool industrial ruins pictures in the two-pages omake. 

The third short story by Asato Mizu features a heroine of our days, a stay-at-home, WataMote-ish young lady whose self-proclaimed career is 'pinpointing': aka, finding the location of any pic. She is sent a request to identify a certain home, which she certainly does... with surprising results. Charming and very close to my interests, as I also spend inordinate amounts of time on Google Earth. 

Now, the dōjinshi is surprisingly scant about the authors themselves, and having rather common names I'm sort on the fence about identifying them with absolute certainty: I am fairly sure Nagase Yousuke is this manga artist, considering they list 'ruins' as their passion, and I'm almost as sure about this one account being our Isao Hayashi. I'm a bit more on the fence about identifying Mizu Asato with the author of a gazillion anime spinoffs, though the tract is somewhat similar. It doesn't help, of course, that all three authors make almost no reference to their dōjin past... well, in case I'm right, well done! All three of you made it. Cool stuff!