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So I spent a bit on doujinshi this weekend. I forgot what I was originally searching for that led to the discovery, but I happened across the Otaku Republic shop, which stocks a relative wealth of Akari Funato and Lunar doujinshi. (Not all the entries under the "LUNAR" tag are related to the franchise, of course, but enough are.) I didn't end up getting most of the Lunar doujins, though, because a) they're $18 a pop, and b) most of them were made by this one artist whose stuff looks a bit rough and not always...mentally well. The cover of one of his alleged Lunar books is a photo of a sweaty, bleeding bespectacled man with the words "DIE DIE DIE" scrawled down the side. (I do see belatedly, though, that he did a doujinshi for the DS Lunar, which I would've snapped up for sheer novelty had it not taken me a while to recognize the characters, much less pick them out from the Zardoz-like entity in the background threatening to eat them.) Anyhow, I got a book from this artist with Mia on the cover, so we'll see how that goes.
As for the Funato doujin, I see that she has, despite being busy commercially with Under the Rose, put out a couple end-of-year anthology doujin recently. The work inside, though, doesn't seem to be of recent vintage; the books seem to be anthologies of older promo pieces for a variety of games. I see the second book has a Phantasy Star III piece, which almost motivated me to buy it, but looking at the preview images, I don't think it'd get through customs. I opted to get an anthology book from her for 2011, which was close to the release of Harmony, so maybe (*maybe*) there'll be some Lunar stuff in there. (Funato insists that absolutely all her Lunar work is in her PDFs, but that is, as previously discussed, not accurate. She seems to have cut her ties completely with the franchise, though, which is a shame; I would've liked to have seen some Vheen Hikuusen anniversary art or something.)
Anyhow, after buying those two books plus a Baten Kaitos and a Mystic Ark doujinshi, I started hunting around for other doujin shops, with the intention of checking them out later. (I had already, as you've gathered, spent a good amount of time at Otaku Republic.) I did, though, pop in on this From Japan place that claimed to offer a multi-store search engine, and I wasn't expecting to find much (I've looked on Yahoo Auctions and Rakuten for doujin for years with nearly no results), but lo and behold:
.
Vheen Hikuusen doujinshi. They're from a store called Suruga-Ya from their Yahoo Shopping (not Auctions) outlet, and they're apparently a part of a four-issue series (the other two feature Mia on the cover, though). I ended up getting the whole series (plus a spare Baten Kaitos doujin) through the Buyee proxy - Buyee's owned by Tenso, which I've used before, so I thought it was the safest choice. Upon surfing, though, I've learned that Suruga-Ya doesn't always follow through on its orders with the utmost diligence, so I'm still on shaky ground here - but it was just a joy to see a doujin with a smiling & happy TnK Dyne & Ghaleon on the cover. Fingers crossed that these arrive safely.
Incidentally, I did feel that I'd wasted a bit of my money with my initial Otaku Republic trip - three of the doujinshi on which I'd spent $18 at Otaku Republic were available at Suruga-Ya for the equivalent of a couple bucks a pop. That's not figuring in shipping, though (both from the store to the proxy and from the proxy to me), which is always the absolute killer. (Shipping is already included in Otaku Republic's prices.) I'll expect I'll have wasted some money at Otaku Republic (provided Suruga-Ya actually delivers its order), but not that much, in the long run. Of course, "wasted" is a relative term here, considering that I'll have spent triple digits on a handful of comic books in any event.
Misc. notes:
- If anyone heads over to Otaku Republic looking for Lunar manga, a word of warning: this book mainly contains a Magical School Lunar fanfic. I don't think there are any actual comics or art in it.
- Suruga-Ya has a good deal of other Lunar doujins, but they appear to consist mainly of blandly-drawn Lucia romances, which, from my limited experience with Lunar doujin, seem to be the predominant genre in the field. I like Lucia, and she's a good character, but she's an easy character to get wrong, and many artists use her unfamiliarity with the way the human world works to cast her as vapid & dumb.
- After searching through the stuff that was tagged with Funato's name outright, I also took a look through stuff that was tagged with what Otaku Republic claimed was the name of the doujin circle to which she belonged before she became an "official" game artist, so to speak. It turned up a lot of results that I don't think are entirely accurate - the styles are so disparate that it'd have to be a very big circle with a constant turnover in membership to have produced all the books. I did, however, come across this Ocarina of Time doujin, and I'm trying to figure out if it the cover was produced by Funato or not. Yeah, it says "Orie Asato only" on the cover, but that does really look like Funato's early style & coloring. And yet there's enough of a difference where I can't be sure. Hmm.
(Additional note: oh, God dammit. I knew the name of Funato's early doujin circle was billed in certain manga as "Fight & Magic," so I put that into the search engine, and it returned all sorts of books. They're all out-of-stock, though.)
(Additional additional note: I have that "Kingdom of Bugs" Fight & Magic doujin - the one with the girl in pigtail braids & an orange dress on the cover - and it's an anthology doujin she did with another artist with illustrations & real short (like two-page) comics on a variety of 8-bit & 16-bit RPGs - FF4, FF5, Lagrange Point, some Dragon Quests, etc. It's a pleasant little distraction but not a top-priority purchase.)
- I've seen that Octopus Tentacle doujin of Funato's everywhere, but I don't know what it's about. I think I ran across a quick explanation from Funato somewhere (her website probably) that branded it as covering some RPG series I didn't care for, but I can't recall exactly which series it was at the moment. (The book's not what you think a doujin named "Octopus Tentacle" would be about, let's put it that way.)
- Looking for Phantasy Star is a tricky prospect, as you're inundated with PSO stuff (and I'm not sure what the point of PSO doujin is; it always details the adventures of the artist's MMO characters, which really isn't for the amusement of anyone but the artist). I have found what appears to be an annual anthology series of PS doujin that seems to center on the original, main line of games, and while I admire the effort, the art - the cover art, at least - seems kind of uneven throughout the series, and the books look a bit cheaply made. I'll probably bite on one eventually, but I held off for now.
In other PS doujin news, the cover of this one seems interesting, from what I can make out from the blurry scan, but it's unfortunately out of stock.
- I'm not sure, but I think that this might be a paper version of that Neo Angelique Nyx doujin I mentioned earlier.
- Angelique Collet by way of Claire Redfield.
- It's pitiful that I checked, but there seems to be nothing - absolutely nothing - out there in the Japanese fan world, doujinshi, fanart, or otherwise, for Vay.
.
As for the Funato doujin, I see that she has, despite being busy commercially with Under the Rose, put out a couple end-of-year anthology doujin recently. The work inside, though, doesn't seem to be of recent vintage; the books seem to be anthologies of older promo pieces for a variety of games. I see the second book has a Phantasy Star III piece, which almost motivated me to buy it, but looking at the preview images, I don't think it'd get through customs. I opted to get an anthology book from her for 2011, which was close to the release of Harmony, so maybe (*maybe*) there'll be some Lunar stuff in there. (Funato insists that absolutely all her Lunar work is in her PDFs, but that is, as previously discussed, not accurate. She seems to have cut her ties completely with the franchise, though, which is a shame; I would've liked to have seen some Vheen Hikuusen anniversary art or something.)
Anyhow, after buying those two books plus a Baten Kaitos and a Mystic Ark doujinshi, I started hunting around for other doujin shops, with the intention of checking them out later. (I had already, as you've gathered, spent a good amount of time at Otaku Republic.) I did, though, pop in on this From Japan place that claimed to offer a multi-store search engine, and I wasn't expecting to find much (I've looked on Yahoo Auctions and Rakuten for doujin for years with nearly no results), but lo and behold:
.Vheen Hikuusen doujinshi. They're from a store called Suruga-Ya from their Yahoo Shopping (not Auctions) outlet, and they're apparently a part of a four-issue series (the other two feature Mia on the cover, though). I ended up getting the whole series (plus a spare Baten Kaitos doujin) through the Buyee proxy - Buyee's owned by Tenso, which I've used before, so I thought it was the safest choice. Upon surfing, though, I've learned that Suruga-Ya doesn't always follow through on its orders with the utmost diligence, so I'm still on shaky ground here - but it was just a joy to see a doujin with a smiling & happy TnK Dyne & Ghaleon on the cover. Fingers crossed that these arrive safely.
Incidentally, I did feel that I'd wasted a bit of my money with my initial Otaku Republic trip - three of the doujinshi on which I'd spent $18 at Otaku Republic were available at Suruga-Ya for the equivalent of a couple bucks a pop. That's not figuring in shipping, though (both from the store to the proxy and from the proxy to me), which is always the absolute killer. (Shipping is already included in Otaku Republic's prices.) I'll expect I'll have wasted some money at Otaku Republic (provided Suruga-Ya actually delivers its order), but not that much, in the long run. Of course, "wasted" is a relative term here, considering that I'll have spent triple digits on a handful of comic books in any event.
Misc. notes:
- If anyone heads over to Otaku Republic looking for Lunar manga, a word of warning: this book mainly contains a Magical School Lunar fanfic. I don't think there are any actual comics or art in it.
- Suruga-Ya has a good deal of other Lunar doujins, but they appear to consist mainly of blandly-drawn Lucia romances, which, from my limited experience with Lunar doujin, seem to be the predominant genre in the field. I like Lucia, and she's a good character, but she's an easy character to get wrong, and many artists use her unfamiliarity with the way the human world works to cast her as vapid & dumb.
- After searching through the stuff that was tagged with Funato's name outright, I also took a look through stuff that was tagged with what Otaku Republic claimed was the name of the doujin circle to which she belonged before she became an "official" game artist, so to speak. It turned up a lot of results that I don't think are entirely accurate - the styles are so disparate that it'd have to be a very big circle with a constant turnover in membership to have produced all the books. I did, however, come across this Ocarina of Time doujin, and I'm trying to figure out if it the cover was produced by Funato or not. Yeah, it says "Orie Asato only" on the cover, but that does really look like Funato's early style & coloring. And yet there's enough of a difference where I can't be sure. Hmm.
(Additional note: oh, God dammit. I knew the name of Funato's early doujin circle was billed in certain manga as "Fight & Magic," so I put that into the search engine, and it returned all sorts of books. They're all out-of-stock, though.)
(Additional additional note: I have that "Kingdom of Bugs" Fight & Magic doujin - the one with the girl in pigtail braids & an orange dress on the cover - and it's an anthology doujin she did with another artist with illustrations & real short (like two-page) comics on a variety of 8-bit & 16-bit RPGs - FF4, FF5, Lagrange Point, some Dragon Quests, etc. It's a pleasant little distraction but not a top-priority purchase.)
- I've seen that Octopus Tentacle doujin of Funato's everywhere, but I don't know what it's about. I think I ran across a quick explanation from Funato somewhere (her website probably) that branded it as covering some RPG series I didn't care for, but I can't recall exactly which series it was at the moment. (The book's not what you think a doujin named "Octopus Tentacle" would be about, let's put it that way.)
- Looking for Phantasy Star is a tricky prospect, as you're inundated with PSO stuff (and I'm not sure what the point of PSO doujin is; it always details the adventures of the artist's MMO characters, which really isn't for the amusement of anyone but the artist). I have found what appears to be an annual anthology series of PS doujin that seems to center on the original, main line of games, and while I admire the effort, the art - the cover art, at least - seems kind of uneven throughout the series, and the books look a bit cheaply made. I'll probably bite on one eventually, but I held off for now.
In other PS doujin news, the cover of this one seems interesting, from what I can make out from the blurry scan, but it's unfortunately out of stock.
- I'm not sure, but I think that this might be a paper version of that Neo Angelique Nyx doujin I mentioned earlier.
- Angelique Collet by way of Claire Redfield.
- It's pitiful that I checked, but there seems to be nothing - absolutely nothing - out there in the Japanese fan world, doujinshi, fanart, or otherwise, for Vay.
.
