Oh ho! I hope you enjoy it! 
Speaking of which… I finished that issue of Harta!
ハルタ ９７号
There’s no 新連載 in this one but there’s a handful of 読切 - a couple I liked are:
キッサコ by 児島青 about a nice and mysterious tea time.
and ストレンジハウスの子供たち by 徳留圭秋, about three odd characters in an odd house, which has a really nice art and a strange vibe that I like a lot. I think what it reminds me of is (distant memories of) Tony Millionaire’s Sock Monkey - that kind of like… detailed line art showing the whimsical adventures of a memorable cast of odd characters in a way that feels like a kid’s story but with material that isn’t really for kids at all. Anyway, I think it’s neat and would be happy to see more.
There’s also a feature called “Harta Begins” that’s a collection of eight 8-page shorts. That’s a pretty short time to make an impression and I happened to be especially tired when I read this part but it seemed like a cool interesting little thing. I wonder if it’s a way to recycle series pitches or something (I often wonder how many shorts in general are series pitches, since some do end up becoming series, and others just have that vibe).
ようこそにんげん, the yonkoma about a human attending a school of animals ends in this issue in kind of a bittersweet way. It was pretty fun. I wonder if another yonkoma will replace it soon? Usually (always?) in the time I’ve been reading there’s been one or two, which seems like a good percentage to me.
In terms of my usual favorites, Dungeon Meshi’s chapter was a really interesting change of pace! would be an interesting, oddly maybe sort of ideal starting place if say you had this issue of the magazine but hadn’t read Dungeon Meshi before, 希釈王 was unusual as usual, I thought the Hotel one was especially sweet this time around (flashbacks to hotel men befriending each other!), and as usual いやはや、熱海くん is right up my alley.
The back of the magazine has a nice feature that I usually don’t read where authors of different series in the magazine interview each other in a sort of telephone game, with the subject of this issue interviewing the subject in the next issue’s column and so on, and anyway, the author of 熱海くん, 田沼朝, is interviewed this issue, and they talk about having kept a notebook for many years and filling it with miscellaneous lines from imaginary conversations used as grist for the very dialogue and language-focused series (which is totally in-line with the vibe from the series). And when asked about what interests them about this being their first series, the answer given is wanting to portray the kinds of long-term interpersonal relationships that develop slowly over time, which sounds great to me and hopefully means it’ll run for a long time! They’re also from Osaka which is another thing that checks out based on how everyone talks in the book.
other manga report
- 高橋留美子劇場 （３ー４）
These were in line with the other volumes – pretty fun stories based around mundane concerns with a zany touch to them. - くしゃみ
This is a Naoki Urasawa short story collection that I remember being pretty fun! It’s been a bit of time (I read that Harta issue surprisingly slowly) but the material that sticks out most in my memory is the non-fiction work that shows Urasawa’s deep love of classic rock and guitars, with stuff like visiting a festival in America and getting to jam with a music industry person who was at the Beatles rooftop concert, and so on. It’s not really an interest I share with him at all, but the obvious enthusiasm shown is pretty infectious. - けものみち （１）
This is a volume I picked up a long time ago, I think just because I heard pro-wrestling was involved? And… it is, but this reminds me most of the kind of manga I would check out from the library and that wouldn’t hit with me – I think the biggest sign of which is like, too jumbled of a premise introduced too abruptly, without time to actually process and get to know the characters. In this case it’s like – a pro wrestler gets isekai’d, and introduces the concept of a pet shop to the fantasy world, and is helped out by a group of monster women? And you just kind of start the story in the middle of all of that. It starts to sorta explain things like how these characters met later in the volume, but it just seemed like a lot of disjointed elements to me and I personally would likely have preferred more focus on the “pro wrestler gets isekai’d; has tendency to german suplex people” element rather than the “isekai’d animal lover tries to establish the concept of a pet shop in a fantasy world” element. - ドラえもん （３）
Doraemon’s awfully fun, and I remember having enough trouble with the first volume that it’s pretty satisfying still to just… read it. There’s an inventiveness to the storylines that lines me roughly of like, Calvin and Hobbes storylines. One from this volume I enjoyed is about Doraemon time traveling to read new chapters of a manga early only to wind up feeding those chapters to the deadline-plagued mangaka in the past and eventually writing the manga himself. - ONE PIECE （１ー２）
I successfully lured a work friend who majored in Japanese in college to Bookwalker with a gifted copy of Dungeon Meshi, and he’s a huge One Piece fan so I’m trying to lure him further and further by reading along with him in One Piece (which I read some of a very long time ago in English). It’s been fun! It was really cool to see how much he’s been enjoying it, although progress understandably slowed down as the novelty wore off and the reality of the pacing started dialing up… - 東京卍リベンジャーズ （１ー２）
Didn’t really know anything about this going in, but I’ve found it a very enjoyable mix of school gangs and time travel so far! I like the art, and it seems brisk and suspenseful in that way that makes for easy reading. - 青のフラッグ （１ー２）
A close friend recommended this highly but otherwise I didn’t know anything about it. It’s really fun! The author is especially talented at that kind of endearing character art where the level of detail on them can change to be cute or funny or serious, and the love… triangle? is well-constructed and interesting, and full of likeable and relatable perspectives and emotionally fraught situations. - ヴィンランド・サガ （１）
I’ve read a handful of volumes of this before in English, and honestly it’s at that awkward level where the English is fresh enough in my mind I’m not enthusiastic about reading parts over again in Japanese, but not so fresh that I’m all that confident in skipping ahead in the Japanese version (and I think I got three volumes free? So I mean, might as well catch up…) which put this in a tough spot, especially when the previous two series I mentioned were engaging in a much fresher-to-me sort of way. But I do like Vinland Saga! So I’m sure I’ll read further and catch up to where I was but maybe I’ll give it some time…
One slightly brain-melting technique that was interesting to see coming from the English version, is that the difference between the Norse language and say, the Frankish language here is the former is written as regular Japanese, and the latter is still Japanese, but written horizontally, filling more western-shaped word balloons.