I finished another Harta magazine
Harta #86
A new series debuts called 猫のまにまに about a mild-mannered young woman inadvertently coming to live with and care for a 猫又 - i.e. a catgirl.
With that premise I was expecting something really fetishy, and I mean… it is - but I wasn’t expecting it to be as fun as it is. I’ve definitely come across “oops I guess I have to take care of a hot monster” manga with a lot less style than this (no offense meant, Merman in My Tub), so I gotta admit it won me over with the first impression.
Two volumes recently came out in quick succession for the zombie manga, 生き残った６人によると
I should catch up and recommend it more strongly, that one’s really grown on me.
An author named 野町達也 has their second standout 特別読切 (one-shot), this one about mourning family members who were awful to you, told through the story of a man carrying the remains of his universally despised parents up a mountain to the temple.
That author has the advantage of a style that really pops so I recognized them right away! Would be happy to read more but it doesn’t look like they have anything out, so I guess I’ll just have to wait patiently.
Another one-shot in here, マコちゃんと海 by 示よう子 (Youko Shimesu - cool name) is a lesbian first love story that’s very sweet and also very sexually explicit. I was glad to see it, both both because it’s still nice to see a queer romance story that’s neither tragic nor implied, and because it reassures me again there’s probably not any like, editorial stricture against spelling out a queer relationship like that.
There were more 八咫烏杯 / Yatagarasu Hai contest winners in this one - a neat take on the dynamic between a 魔王 and the priest at the starting village who sends the hero on his quest, a Shogi-themed mystery solved by two bickering twins, and a short but sweet “grass is greener” kind of story about a gateway to another world.
I feel like the contest manga get less editorial oversight, so I feel like some of them could use tightening up pagecount wise… but it’s still a cool variety and always nice to see an artist debut and wonder what might be in store for them.
also did I mention Dungeon Meshi is really good
Ideally I’d like to try to catch up fully with Harta by the end of the year… and even more ideally, also with the spin-off magazine, Blue Knight, which I still haven’t read any of… and also the fun-looking special I found where artists from the magazine all contribute stories intentionally out-of-step genre-wise from their on-going series… and also with the series that I started the magazine in the middle of… and ah geez come to think of it they did a special issue in the summer I completely forgot about…
I do also still intend to binge wrestling magazines at some point to catch up on that too.
And I kinda wanted to read a Monthly Halloween for like, the non-monthly Halloween…