One of the best parts of this gig are when I get to witness the birth of a new magazine. One of the strangest parts of this gig is witnessing the birth of a new magazine.

I became an anime fan back in the day when characters were drawn to be look more mature than their age. So, the slide into extreme moe has not favored my tastes at all. I keep thinking that, at some point, there has to be a swing back to grown-up looking characters, right? The existence of Monthly Comic Cune says, flat out no, Erica, you are wrong, bzzt, fuggedaboufit, there is no end point to the round, featureless, infantile blobbiness of this art style and it will never go away. Even more poignant is the magazine’s tagline, which couldn’t be wronger in my case, “Made for you, a new 4-koma comic.” ^_^;

This is the land of giant heads on baby bodies, characters labeled specifically 15, 16, 17 years old who unremittingly look 4 years old. Not for me, no, thank you.

So, why, you must be thinking, am I even bothering? I don’t write posts to whine (hardly ever anymore, it’s boring saying “this sucked.”) so clearly there must be a point. Right? RIGHT?

Yes. The point  of all this is that I really enjoyed the inaugural volume of Comic Cune. I mean honestly. It was fun.

Let’s get the important stuff out of the way – there are a handful of Yuri artists  in this magazine – Fujieda Miyabi, Kuzushiro, Hisanari Minamoto, Namori, all have contributed. And for them alone, it was worth getting this volume. Both Fujieda-sensei and Minamoto-sensei had Yuri in their stories, and Minamoto-sensei’s actually talked about Yuri, and their’s were not the only stories that had girls embracing each other. There’s lot of squeezing and love-love going on between girls here.

But the two stories I enjoyed the most were both comedies based on paranormal creatures (of which there were quite a number of in the issue.) I particularly enjoyed “Tonari no Kyuuketsuki-san” (The Vampire Next Door) and “Dokuro-san ga Miteriru” (Skeleton is Looking), which stars the famous giant skeleton from this picture, living with a young girl, and looming distressingly large over her.

Yes, it’s one joke, but it is a very funny joke.

But wait, there’s also “Goshuujin-sama ha Ningen ja nai” starring a maid for a super-creepy alien mistress.  I mean who wouldn’t want to read that? ^_^

So, yeah, the Yuri’s great, and it’s nice to see artists I know and love in another magazine…and I’ll just ignore the big blobby heads and “zOMG so cute, aren’t they so cute being cute?” moe art. But what’s going to keep me reading this is the utterly weird monster comedy that made me laugh out loud.

This is a Kadokawa publication, so maybe, if we ask nice, they’ll put this on BookWalker.

Ratings:

Overall – 8 I enjoyed it way more than expected.

You see, it’s giant skeleton and it looms, staring with big blank eyes, but it’s really a nice guy…but it’s so big and loomy…. Trust me, it’s funny.