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.

Title (in Japanese): カスタムメイド・ガール ~みやま零画集~

Cost: 2800 yen (ex tax)

ISBN: 978-4-04-867030-2

Artist: Miyama Zero (Miyama0)

Published: 31 July 2008

Page count: 130

Illustrations: > 160 (claimed)

Rating: NSFW

That’s right. NSFW artbook. Wow, did 80% of the readers just close the tab? Oh, no, they just minimised the window, looking around for the boss, before resuming their surreptitious browsing session.

Seriously though, from the first proper image you come to, you realise “whoa, this is probably not a good artbook to be wallpapering my cubicle with!” (right after you get over the yuri shock). That said, this review is going to make do with non-H images, so this post is perfectly good to view. Think swim-suit safe level. Besides, the pictures here are pretty small, so unless you are looking through the full-sized PNG archives on a 24 inch screen, you’ll be ‘right.

So this is the cover. Immediately, this artist’s style draws your attention. The riveting eyes, the hair…the facial style is not your conventional sharp slim face – in fact it’s rather chubby, but not Kanon-squashed.

The more knowledgeable ones might immediately pick this up (or hopefully you are good enough to have picked up from the artist name in the title already) that this is the artist who did the (infamous) Kanogi game (Kanojo-tachi No Ryuugi-Their Styles-), which was annoying because of the fact that certain people kept harping on about it and giving a running documentary on what was happening in the game, while playing the game and typing on IRC at the same time.

Hell, that dog looks pissed off. The first image seems familiar to me, but that’s probably cuz it was on a magazine some time ago. I was thinking if I should debind the magazine to scan the Miyama Zero feature they had in there. I will be seriously considering this and will be comparing the mag and the artbook here. If the artbook contains all the pictures featured in the magazine, then I will go ahead with the debind.

Note the rather bright colours of this artist’s works. I’ve kept the same settings on the scanner as previous scans, and I also checked the artbook and it’s definitely from the source.

Miyama0 seems to do girls with light-coloured hair really well. Strange to say, I have no problems with this rendition of the megane maid (megane not really my thing). I still think it would look better without glasses though.

Also, I quite like the flowing quality of the hair on the characters – it’s one of the traits which stand out for this artist (besides the luminous eyes, of course).

The first part of the artbook is filled with “original illustrations” from various sources. Later on there are sections for various games, then “Copyright” which is basically doujin appropriations of anime/game characters, and “Indie”, whose difference to “original” I know not.

Some of these pictures, I would have seen before (like the one on the left), but since I did not actively follow Miyama0’s career, most of these are new to me.

You tend to notice a variety of styles after a while. For example, that conventional one on the left, and the almost-chibi (with a large head) style on the right.

Food time. That said, the pancake thing nearly jumped the shark for me in terms of the believability of the picture. It’s like you just snap out of the moe-appreciation mode and go “that is bloody ridiculous”. Happens sometimes only.

For a moment there I thought the one on the right was Alto on stage (if you didn’t get that reference, you don’t watch Macross Frontier and you should get on Tokyotosho right now and jump on the bandwagon).

With these game illustrations things, I think Princess Bride is one of the older games, thus an older style of illustration. I totally wouldn’t pick up this artist if the style stayed like this.

Happily, we progress past this, and the evolutionary change is quite visible.

Some kind of Futakoi-like pose for the Kanogi twins. Check out the second pic in the large version. You can’t really see it in thumbnail, but it’s a great concept. She is lying in bed listening to a clockwork music box on her headphones. I reckon someone should make that! An mp3 player, of course, powered by clockwork (with a wind-up key). Would be a pain in the arse to have to wind it up now and then, but what a steam-punkish concept!

(I also had another idea today while on the train. You know how there are watches which generate electricity by moving a little metal turbine thing around when you move your wrist? How about integrating that same concept into a yoyo, so you can use the sleeping motion when playing with a yoyo to build up sufficient electricity to charge mp3 players/mobile phones?)

Note the similarity of the girl’s card (right picture) to the ones in picture 18. Cross-reference ftw.

We are into the “Copyright” section here, so spot the characters. I’m sure the second one is too easy. The characters are also from other games as well.

Yuri goodness! Miyama Zero seems to like yuri quite a bit, and this is one of the milder pictures in the book.

Cool fighting action is also racking up the points for me. And Itou Noizi fans should be quite clear on what the second picture is of.

The cat provides the best clue for the second picture.

These look vaguely familiar, but I am not a H-game specialist. Doesn’t stop the moe-appreciation though.

If you cannot recognise the left picture, you would be pretty out of touch. That said, I might be missing the “dead eyes” so commonly found on this character.

The Indie part (here represented by only one rather yuri picture) is rather short. At the end of the book, there is a catalogue of all the images and blurbs on where they’re from.

So as we draw this review to a close, what is the verdict? For every SFW moe image here, I say there are around 2.5 superb, but H pictures in the artbook. A lot of that stuff is of the best quality, DESPITE (note, not BECAUSE) of the NSFW nature of the illustration. I would look at the picture and think “that is a GREAT picture”, but be unable to scan it for the review.

(No, don’t start typing the request comments. You know the policy about reviews, and I’m sticking to it. Also, it IS sufficient to have only SFW pictures to review an NSFW artbook, precisely because of the “despite” clause above. Call it censorship if you like, but if what little I have provided has provoked in you the INSATIABLE urge to have a gander at the dirty stuff, that’s an indication you should be buying the book.)

So what the review is really for is to help people decide if they want to buy the artbook. Given I started from ZERO (geddit? haha!) acquaintance with this artist (apart from some incidental spotting), and ended up becoming a fan by the time I reached the end of my scanning session, I’d say there is something in there, definitely.

Now, the NSFW nature of the book means…well, whatever it means, it’s generally seen as a strike against a book, because you’re not going to be able to show it off to the most generic audience possible, I’d venture. But like I said before, some of those illustrations are brilliant.

The book itself is also solidly engineered.  Great fit of the pictures into the real estate, great colours, although the palette is a bit over-bright, as earlier mentioned, which could be an intended style. The characters, while not fitting into the more traditional forms, have great design. They rouse your intrigue precisely because they have a more specialised look to them. The luminescence and complexity of their eyes (always a hook for my personal aesthetics) cannot be faulted, and the little bit of extra attention to the hair does give that special oomph. The predilection for blondes and yuri cannot hurt either.

I think you have guessed it, but this is a highly recommended get, conditional on your ability to stomach having H on your shelf. Spectacular moe-H, but H, nonetheless.

9 comments