I enjoyed another manga magazine!
ハルタ ８２号
Overall, each series continues to grow on me, particularly 生き残った6人によると, 真柴姉弟は顔が固い, and ホテル・メッツァペウラへようこそ.
Dungeon Meshi is still good!
One thing I haven’t mentioned that gives ハルタ an extra special feel compared to other magazines, is the covers aren’t shots from the manga inside, but special one-off art pieces, sometimes, like in this issue, with a “cover story” of a brief manga in the world of the cover. Here it imagines the magazine as a record store, complete with fun record-inspired album art for some of the series!
The mountain climbing manga (山を渡る -三多摩大岳部録-) shows off some really nice real sights:
Seeing 新連載 is exciting to me!
The one-shot from the first issue I read (by Yusei Ito) about the ちびっこ神様 trying to grant good people small fortunes becomes a series here! (It’s called ふくふく万福帳 )
And あかねさす柘榴の都 by Yuko Fukunami is about a teen reconnecting with an aunt in Southern Spain
In this issue there’s also a reprint manga and article memorializing a mangaka named 宮田紘次, who passed away suddenly in 2015. I wasn’t familiar with them but it seems like they were talented.
A standout 特別読切 in this issue is 魔王 by Tatsuya Nomachi.
A hero comes to find out that the 魔王 they were raised to fight just seemed threatening because they were reclusive and didn’t realize a giant sinister floating eye in the sky would threaten people. They end up traveling the world and giving monsters nicer names. The style’s really striking and I’m not doing the plot summary justice.
Since that seinen/josei/shonen/shojo discussion was still on my mind, I noticed that in the reader feedback section, they print the gender and age of the people whose comments are published. Obviously not necessarily a reflective sample, but I thought it was interesting in light of what we talked about.
They are as follows:
17歳女性
26歳女性
34歳女性
33歳女性
46歳男性
49歳男性
61歳男性
27歳女性
25歳女性
43歳女性
28歳女性
35歳女性
34歳女性
28歳男性