Hunting the Elusive

Time for a bit of retrospective even as C77 is coming along. Sometimes I feel that this blog has been skewing toward the commercial artbooks and magazines a bit, so I want to try to bring it back in line with the doujin side of the hunt, which is infinitely more interesting and so much more satisfying. Today, we’ll look at the Chocolate Cube (Miwa Futaba) March 2009 release of PureGirl. I can’t exactly recall the circumstances behind this purchase, but I think the cover art and the page-count had something to do with it. For a doujin release, this is fairly substantial, at 52 scanned pages (54 if you include the blanks inside the cover). The theme is Touhou. [Release] [PNG]

Some people might be getting a bit tired of Touhou. Not me, and not, apparently, the Japanese scene. If you check the Toranoana series listing for the C77 doujins, for example, Touhou still leads the way by far, and the doujin music scene is still substantially Touhou.

The cover is quite confusing because it looks pretty much the same on both sides (different characters though), and on one side of the book the character is upside down. It’s easier when the plastic jacket is fitted on though, since the gold leaf title indicates the front side.

Take off the jacket, though, and you just get this.

The landing page, and Miwa Futaba’s Pixiv, shows that this is originally just one big illustration.

We get a number of spreads in this book, and PureGirl starts off with a spread. Interestingly, Miwa Futaba has opted to include white borders on the spine sides of the page spreads, which goes some ways toward helping stitching the scans, hopefully. However, even with my spine-edge scanner, I fear there are some missing pixels which will make stitching quite hard.

I’ll be skipping a few less-special pages in this post, but suffice to say the art is very cute and PureGirl could in fact be considered half an artbook, since it’s basically a collection of stuff that Miwa Futaba has done in the past.

I notice some inconsistencies in art quality, just with the depiction of the faces. However, when the art is good, it’s really good.

As I might have noted earlier in some other posts, my favourite Touhou character is Alice, the Seven-Coloured Puppeteer (Nanairo no Ningyoutsukai, what a cool name). I have some reason to suspect Miwa Futaba is a fan too.

The illustrations seem to become much better in quality and cuteness as you proceed in the book. Really love the candy-stripe one.

The Touhou girls in alternative clothing?

 

Ah, yuri-ness. The autumn colours are nice too.

Great Touhou x Alice crossover.

While I really like the pastelly/light coloured illustrations by Miwa Futaba, no one can refuse dark yuri.

Whooo more Alice goodness. Love the starry dress.

The artist exhibits a decided liking for checker background. I do like it too, so no complaints from me.

This is what I mean by the pastel/light colour palette. It’s almost like the one used by tearfish. Gives things a pretty vintage and fresh look.

Same effect here, where the characters are almost sepia against a deep blue sky.

And it seems we now have some stability in style, and it’s a good style too. Definitely an artist to follow into the future, I think. Though the C77 release is a monochrome manga, from what I understand.

This artist seems to like the Marisa x Alice pairing. Interesting. Both are blondes too. Great details in the sakura tree.

We get some more chibi-ish characters here.

The bunnies, and then it’s more Alice!

Last illustration.

So what do we have here? A very conventionally cute style, but still quite distinguishable, with a palette which is quite a refreshing change from the Akihabara-vividness that most illustrators and games use, while not being in the ethereal realm like Shimeko or even POP. As per the cute style, very big eyes, though not overly detailed, overall the facial structure is effective and not odd looking. Put this on the watch list, and hopefully we get more full colour stuff from Miwa Futaba in the future.

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