The thesis is going… not very well. Some exhaustion, I guess. I’ll do it now. In the meantime, here’s a dōjinshi you can read in its entirety, if you’re okay with spotting some malware. There are no links, but you can just put the title and read it at your leisure. Warning: very NSFW.
So, this is actually one of the first dōjinshi I put on my (now defunct, please come back…) Doujinshi and Manga Lexicon wishlist. We go back a long way, to the year 2000 to be precise, with the very European title Make 2 TWO, What translates to the stage of “getting by” or something? I don’t know, I don’t know any German.
Anyway, while the Studio NEO BLACK circle is largely an nsfw art set, which then churns out copious amounts of KanColle p0rn, this 26-page black-and-white booklet is actually more of a tame compilation of illustrations, featuring only mild nudity and no explicit content at all. Some are stand-alone, others are tied to the dōjin series ongoing at the time. silent butterfly, also from Studio NEO BLACK. Much of it is sketches, including some draft pages from the aforementioned series, but there are also some pinups and a couple of digital illustrations. Most of the material actually comes from earlier dōjin, gathered here to, according to the author, “collect as many ideas as possible in one place, before the turn of the century.” Advisable.
NEO BLACK (aka Ikuta Daisuke) definitely has a polished treatment, especially when it comes to the human figure. Even the sketches have a purposeful liveliness, especially when it comes to facial expressions: entire pages are devoted to portraits, which effectively convey a wide range of emotions. we are far from moe territory – at the moment there is almost something his or even gekiga – I like the style of NEO BLACK, although much more polished. A kind of realistic style that seems to have gone a little out of fashion lately.
This is of course another now inactive circle -_- looks like your last post was Magical Madoka / Monster Hunter collaborative work in 2019. Still, I guess a career of about 20 years isn’t that bad.