Hunting the Elusive

or was it “Custom Maid Girl”? You never know if the Japanese are making puns with the katakana. Who knows, all that katakana you see which you translate into perfectly proper English/Engrish could very well have weird Freudian meanings stuck in them. They’re cleverer than they look/sound, those Japanese katakana writers! And they’re probably laughing at you like “Haha, he just pronounced DICK in his head! Like DICK-to-shun-na-ri, geddit?!” Psychotic reality-bending tangent aside, this is Miyama Zero’s first individual artbook, as the obi thingomajig so enthusiastically splashes out in white kanji. [Download: pictures in this post] [JPG version] EDIT: apologies to the guys on the feeds, I seem to have posted up three duplicates of this one because Live Writer insisted it had failed during its attempts (and my connection decided to be patchy at that moment). Clones have now been deleted, and it is safe to come out from under the table. You can turn off your light sabres too.

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"My Name is Domino" was released 30 December 2000, making this one of the older releases archived on this site.  The original character design and artist was Ryo Ueda, who is also known by the doujin group name "FancyFantasia". It was basically a cardboard folder with 16 sheets of illustrations and line art on large-sized glossy paper within. A number of guest artists also participated, namely Makoto 2-Go, Mayu Nagase (Aoi Nanase) and Hiroki Ozaki. [Download]

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This post was actually ready some time ago, but this week has turned out busier than I anticipated (had to build a new computer) so here it is. This book was published on 30 July 2008, retailing for 2200 yen ex tax. ISBN 978 4 8291 7669 6. 96 pages, of which 64 are full colour (2/3 colour, 1/3 monochrome). It contains only illustrations by Takanae for the Ninomiya-kun series of novels, comics and anime. [Download review pictures] [JPG version]

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…or, “How camera skillz can be used to pick up”. Please forgive me for this short diary-like post, but I just have to do it while everything is fresh on my mind. No photos or pictures this time round. So I went to the Death Cab for Cutie concert at the Enmore Theatre here in Sydney, and managed to get to near the front of the stage (it was basically stage, fence, one row of people, then me in the second row of people, standing of course).

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In July, KEI’s first collected artbook was released to the commercial market. KEI is of course the illustrator of the famous Vocaloid characters and it comes as no surprise that the jacket cover is Hatsune Miku. I know, some of us are sick of Vocaloid already, but rest assured this artbook is about more than just that. KEI, for the uninitiated, has a very distinctive style which is increasingly being imitated by others. I think we might actually be better served if I just copy what the blurb in the book actually says in Engrish. [Download: All pictures in this post @ 454MB] [JPG version @ 21MB]

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This CD by Chronolog (Sakurazawa Itumi) was released at the last Comic Market. Now seems as good a time to release it as any, seeing the next Comiket is upon us. Like many other artist-released CDs, this one uses HTML web pages for content navigation, although some people like me prefer to dive straight into the directories. It contains quite a large number of colour art, a big collection of wallpaper (up to 1600 resolution) and two high-res (lossless) PSD files. Look in Omake for a whole dump of old art too. [Download: RAR]

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Welcome to another instalment of my solitary promenades. Over the last few weekends (with the exception of last week, when I was working on Eve no Jikan), I have been stepping out to explore Sydney. More than ever, I am awed by the vast variety of landscapes this city presents. A bit of a journey out from the CBD and you are out of the concrete jungle, and thrust into the middle of nature and history. This time, we gain access to the industrial ruins of Cockatoo Island. [Download: all photos in post]

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This is an unbelievably long post covering what some artists will be putting out for the Comic Market 74 event, which runs from 15 to 17 August. I opened nearly 170 tabs in a Firefox window to check out the artists. It’s quite unbelievable how many artists I have bookmarked. In fact, it is bloody ridiculous. Of course, I have eliminated some (don’t expect 170 artists here) who are not participating or have made the information too hard to get. It took around 3 days to compile all this info, what a pain. And I’m not even going. Anyway, there are a few pretty epic things coming out at Comiket, a larger proportion of all-colour things than previously, as well as the usual Keumaya goodness (right at the very end).

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I’m not really sure what value this release has, but I wasn’t going to keep the Tech Gian magazines around, since they were too heavy and bulky and took up enough space for four artbooks. So rather than just chuck them out, I went through and debound the pages which contained moe non-H illustrations, mostly from games and such. A variety of artists and styles, basically a dump-yard which I am sure catalogue-freaks will enjoy themselves sorting and tagging. I’ve left some of the scanning borders intact in case people want to give joining page spreads a go. [Download: JPG main archive | Download: JPG card archive ]

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