Thanks to everyone who offered birthday thanks this week! I’ve been thinking hard about what I wanted as my first post-birthday review, and decided that today, I’m talking about something that fully embraces the idea that if you don’t see what you want to read in the world you should just go ahead and make it.

Shilin Huang is an artist I have been following for some years. Her webcomic, Carciphona is excellent in every way; art, story and characters. In 2014 I was fortunate enough to be at TCAF and be able to purchase her first artbook, Toccata from the artist directly. 

This year at Otakuthon, I was ecstatic to see her in the artist alley and to pick up her newest artbook,  Toccata II. Shilin’s art has…well, matured isn’t the right word, exactly. It’s approaching mastery. I’m not being entirely hyperbolic, either. A few of the pictures in this book were positively Raphael-esque in depth of color, pose and texture. 

Of the pictures I like best, many of them are riffing on the main characters from Carciphona; sorcerer Veloce Visrin and her archenemy(?) Blackbird who, particularly set out of context in realish-world situations, make for a really sexy couple. The comic itself is a high fantasy, so it’s always kind of fun to see Veloce and Blackbird in modern clothes in a modern apartment, as well as in their native elaborate fantasy setting. You can take a look at many of the images as posters in Shilin’s shop  – and she sometimes does drawing online in live sessions, which is always entertaining.

I have yet to actually review Carciphona, (although it is on the list, along with any number of other webcomics I read) but let me take a moment to recommend it highly if you like emotionally intense stories of high fantasy and magic and spirits and lots of fighting and swirly art. And if you like it, the first 6 collected volumes are all available in print as a set or as single issues.

In the meantime, I’ll sit here enjoying this picture, Autumn, with Veloce and Blackbird in uncharacteristic (for them) pose on an anachronistic (for them) motorcycle. ^_^

Ratings: 

Overall – 10

This book has some damn fine work in it. 

You can always tell when I love an artist to distraction…I buy their artbooks. ^_^ I have so many that I never tell you about for lack of Yuri, like One Rainy Day by Wakamatsu Kaori – another artist whose postcards you may have gotten in a Lucky Box. Today we’re going to talk about Hoshino Lily, whose art exploded across your screen with her utterly gorgeous work on Mawaru Penguindrum.

Hoshino’s art is reminiscent of Saitou Chiho’s work, so you can totally see why Ikuhara pegged her to work on Penguindrum. The same long, gorgeous bodies, the same sensuality, but a completely different sensibility and color palette.

In Hoshino Lily Illustration Works (星野リリィイラスト集　宝石廻廊), this “Gallery of precious stones” includes work for advertising, color pages from manga magazines, anthologies and Comiket catalogs. There’s a fair amount of BL in the collection, a sprinkling of Yuri and straight couples and/or groups.  She’s great at implying intimacy without nudity.

If you enjoyed her sprawling figures and sensual atmosphere in Penguindrum, you’ll find this an enjoyable collection, as I did. ^_^

Ratings:

Overall – 9

We’re at the portion of my pile where almost all I have left are novels and miscellany. ^_^ My next order is weeks away, so if there’s a perceptible slowdown in reviews, don’t fear, there’s more to come. I’m about 2/3 of the way done with the Heartcatch Precure novel, and it’s better than expected.

Back in 2014, I admitted my fondness for artist Eri Kamijo’s work when I reviewed her artbook GIRLS. Well, she’s got a  new artbook out and it’s just magnificent.

Dear  is everything I like about her work and more.

The cover is one of her color studies, with judicious use of metallic color on the butterflies, to give the image depth. The book itself is a hardcover, with a delightful mix of her color studies, media illustrations,  and sketches. The color illustration art for various media included things like this a master image of a stunning Artemis for the Last Chronicle card game (which is a little less garish than the card image.)

There are a number of Yuri pictures in this collection, as well as a number of adorable straight couples.

Ultimately what I like best are her extremely clean, but natural pictures of random people doing everyday things, like having a morning cup of coffee or checking a wristwatch, in the section of the book labeled “Fashion.” There’s something about her work that just makes me take a deep breath and relax.

Ratings:

Art – 10

If you like pretty women and well-executed art, you can’t go wrong with Dear by Eri Kamijo.

One of the nerdliest things one can do in Japan after walking down the main drag of Akihabara, gaping at the tacky flashiness of it, is to get on the Chuo Line to Nakano. Right outside the North Entrance is a well-used looking shopping arcade, the Nakano Sun Mall. When you enter the arcade, it looks utterly normal with discount health and beauty goods and discount sock and shoe stores, interspersed by small fast food places, cafes and other places to rest one’s weary feet and get unhealthy food. Just like any mall anywhere.

But if you keep walking towards the back, then go up to the top floor and work your way down, you’ll discover the most amazingly rag-tag collection of stores that want to sell you old crap at fairly steep prices. ^_^ This is the home of the Nakano Mandarake, which is spread out in pieces among many other stores filled with fan favorites of days gone by, weird crap you think is weird, old toys, posters, albums, and other things that are not your obsession, but holy crap, are they selling that old Suica card for more than $500? (Yes, they were.)

There are a lot of collectibles stores. We tend to throw money at the Robot, Robot on the top floor for gashapon figurines that we want to pay a premium for, so we get the one we want and in the Mandarake book store for older printed material that we’ve never seen elsewhere. But if you’re into collectible cards, anime cels, train cards, trains, coins, cel phone customization, and of course, discount socks, Nakano Sun Mall is a great way to blow an afternoon and a lot of money. Pro tip for American shoppers: Don’t buy figurines here. Or indeed anywhere in Japan anymore. You can get them cheaper off Amazon and save yourself from carrying them home. In fact, don’t buy anything current or popular in Nakano. You will pay too much. Nakano Mandarake is best for the old, the obscure, the WTF and the OMG. This time I found both a WTF and an OMG. ^_^

The OMG was 2006 artbook called Akogare – Takahashi Makoto Art Collection, (あこがれ―高橋真琴画集) by Takahashi Makoto, who you may remember as the creator of proto-Yuri manga Sakura Namiki.   Takahashi-sensei’s style is incredibly distinctive, his girls are exceedingly stylish, whether they are western fairy tale princesses, or formally dressed Japanese girls. Their faces are round and healthy and pink cheeked, their eyes sparkle with joy.  Even when they face hardship, as they do in the retellings of well-known fairy tales, a slightly doll-like smile curves up their lips. These are girls who faces will never see wrinkles nor become careworn. Their beauty is eternal and unreal.

The collection is called Akogare, but I’m not sure if we, the reader, are meant to admire the beautiful china doll faces we’re seeing and the fairy tale princesses or we are being admired by the faces who smile at us from the page with fixed emotion. Girls are shown mostly in single portrait, staring directly at us, with the occasional fairytale doll-faced prince as company.

The collection appears to span 1960 or so through 1990. From the mid-60s on, anyone would recognize the O-hime-sama look of the characters. And toward the mid-70s, his work developed a very baroque sensibility that was popular right into the 1990s.

Some of his best work, from the mid-20th century girl’s magazine Monthly Shoujo Friend is included. These pictures have faces that would play well even now in girls magazines.  There are a very few pieces from his work, Tokyo-Paris. Nothing, however from Sakura Namiki.

My favorite picture, in fact is the one on the back cover that shows two women walking through a garden, one turned to look at the other.

Ratings:

Overall – 8

For more information about Takahashi Makoto-sensei, current exhibits, etc., visit his Official Site. He’s still around, you can see him in some of the photos of the his exhibit last spring, カワイイの原点・高橋真琴展「ROOTS OF JAPANESE KAWAII」.

Above all, I’m delighted to have discovered this treasure. I’m fairly certain I would not have had the opportunity to see this collection without the acid trip down memory lane that is Mandarake. ^_^

So, what was the WTF? Wait, wait, we’ll get there….