Harta #75 update
January 2025
#75 home post
🍵 general club chat
I’ve been enjoying Harta a lot since starting it. I have only read a handful of manga with book clubs here before this, so casually browsing through the magazine gave me a good sense of what visually captures my attention and what kind of themes I am most drawn to.
It’s so exciting to explore the magazine based on my own enthusiasm, ability, and time available, yet, still have this club for support. Thanks so much everyone for being there and making it so easy for me to find your Harta #75 posts in the wiki table (post #2 above). I thoroughly enjoyed reading your thoughts on the series I started so far! It was also fantastically useful to have details like start/end issues for the series, whether they are transferring etc. I would not have approached this magazine without all the effort that rodan and SeanBones put into their posts. Thank you so much! 
Reviewing the thread I also found this gem I’m going to add to the wiki post #2:
- Rodan’s catch up post - reviews by volume of manga related to Harta - very useful to reference if you’re doing any catch-up on continuing series
reading notes
Here’s what I’ve read from Harta #75 since my last update. All spoilers tagged
☄️ ライカの星 Ch 1 / Laika's star (new series)
I’m not sure if I like the theme yet due to the strong revenge element, but I’m sticking with it and loving the world and art aesthetic. I have big hopes for the ムーシュカ character to pull things up and am looking forward to the next chapter/issue already.
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🥷 姫と忍 / The Princess and the Ninja (one-shot)
The scenery and world art are fantastic. The mangaka has a ways to go to catch up their character art to that standard but overall very fun, I enjoyed it.
As with the last one-shot, I struggled with this (at first). I suspected a similar cause: missing some language cues to fully grasp what is going on, and that compounding as the story progressed. So when I reread it I looked closer at what I may have missed, and I also challenged my assumptions about what was going on. That worked great!
In this case what threw me most was the missing conversion where the princess would have told the ninja she’s going to the isolation room for this rice. After I realised that’s what their conversation was alluding to as they snuck through the castle, the various pieces fell into place
I really was surprised - I was sure I would have so many questions, but clearing up that first part solved everything else.
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👾 紙一重りんちゃん Ch 14 / Paper thin Rin
I thought this was silly and fun and considered following this series, but this was a one off short story. The normal format (from before and continuing from Harta #76) is a 4-koma that either I don’t get or it’s just not funny for me, probably a bit of both. So I won’t continue this one, but I enjoyed this story and doing some searches to puzzle out some of the jokes here (like the 嵐 / あらし (boy band) reference.
central theme/ character in this story, thoughts
AI friend prototype circa 2020.
Little did we know, the “nonsensical AI computer logic” humor this story relies on would be history within a few years of this being published. It’s interesting reading it now thinking, wow, this theme would be handled totally different today. And in just 5 more years, teenagers who grew up with today’s AI will be missing the context for the humor here. Considering that, ドラえもん at 50+ has aged rather gracefully.
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🍽 Dungeon Meshi
I heeded warnings and tried to read it from the start first. The art and story telling didn’t capture me at all. I tried the anime which annoyed me. So I thought it wasn’t for me.
But Ch 65 in Harta 75… that was interesting! The art is much improved, the マルシル character seemed more interesting and complex, I could tell there was an overarching plot, etc. That got me interested and I tried to get a synopsis to catch up… but for those who know the series I guess you already know what I discovered is the mangaka put in a lot of effort to build this world slowly and consistently chapter by chapter. Each question I asked turned into a few more.
So I decided I should just wait to let myself forget what I read and give my Japanese time to improve, then I’ll try again to read it from the start or close like volume 4. It won’t be my highest priority catch-up, a 9 volume build up to Harta is quite a commitment, we’ll see!
catch-up notes
This section is for discussing continuing series - manga running in Harta before the first digital issue #75.
👖 昴とスーさん Vol 1 / The Strange Life of Subaru
This one hadn’t been on my radar, but after discovering it has a mysterious air / sci fi twist, yet it’s very daily life/ easy to read, I jumped in from volume 1 (Harta 75 is in the middle of volume 4). I like the art style - it feels grounded in reality yet has a slight flowy/whimsical air that suits the mood of the story well.
It’s a gentle read (I estimate around Natively 22-23), and I like the daily life insights! Since we’re following Subaru around his everyday, the normal background scenes around the home and town give a glimpse into normal Japanese life. For several scenes I had even recently discussed that aspect of Japanese life just before seeing them in the manga (pulling out the futon for sleeping, good weather for drying laundry announced on the weather forecast, the use of はいはい as a rude, “yeah, yeah I know (give it a rest)”).
Thoughts on vol 1 (spoilers blurred)
I like the concept exploring the daily life struggles of how a grown man gets along in the body of a kid. How does it change his daily interactions with strangers - and partner?
End of volume thoughts: I was so curious about whether it would go into detail about what’s going on / how we got here. When it foreshadowed in Ch 5 that we were approaching this topic, I was expecting (my conjecture) to learn some vague / unknown reason for his transformation, and then perhaps see him getting changed into a different age after their attempt to undo the original transformation. I love that instead of jumping straight into the fog, Ch 6 gives a flashback to a scene earlier in Subaru and Mio’s relationship. This is great, I was hoping for more depth and it’s delivering, both with the flashback and not creating a formulaic scenario that they change his age each time it’s super foggy.