Today, we have a oneshot by an obscure little mangaka named Inio Asano or Asano Inio if you will because it's a pen name. Not sure you've ever heard of him.
Lame jokes aside, What if Tokyo is a story he created for an art exhibit in August 2020, but since it was canceled for... obvious reasons, Asano talked to some people at Big Comic Spirits, revised some dialogue and released it there because, in his words, it would have lost a bit of its meaning if it hadn't been published then.
Asano isn't really someone that needs any sort of introduction, I'm reminded of Atsushi Kaneko saying that when he reads a book or finds a piece of music or watches a movie he really likes, he feels like like he just met a friend from a faraway place that he never had a chance to cross paths with yet. That's a pretty qt thing to say but I kinda understand what At-chan is saying and... I like it. In this particular case, Inio Asano is an old friend, at this point I've known him for almost half my life and his work has always inspired me. I remember reading Nijigahara Holograph and being blown away, and then rereading it again a few years later and discovering more and more things. It's my favorite work from him, it's SO dense that having lectures on it would be hard because you could deeply analyze each page in it, from all the symbolism to just the simple gestures and postures of the characters, the way they're placed on the page and the distance between each of them. But I still remember Hox dumping Oyasumi Punpun on /a/ shortly after he got the volumes in japanese, this was before that place became n/a/ruto. And I remember reading solanin, a manga that touched me in a way few things have, I do believe that it matters when you experience a book or a movie or a manga because you'll always be in a different place and for me, solanin was the most relatable manga I have ever read and I don't really like looking for "relatable characters" in fiction, I think that's a bit of a meme and I also think people misinterpret "relatable" with "perfect for me to self insert as" but I'm going off-track, solanin has a special place in my heart. And I really liked A Girl on The Shore too, I get why some people didn't but it's a picture perfect look at adolescence with all its angst and pain but also with all its hopes and freedom. I don't think a reader should ever pass judgement on a work like "it's too dark" or shit like that, that's an incredibly self-centered thing to say. It's funny, I love this dude but I have still yet to read Reiraku, the years piled on, it eventually got released in english (Downfall) and I bought it almost an entire year ago... and I've still yet to read it. Yeah, I tend to be pretty sluggish with things and I put off stuff for a really long time despite having high interest in said stuff. Oh Well.
There really isn't much to say about this mangaka though, I mean... he has an army of assistant-slaves because of the wild things he does with his layouts but everyone knows that already. This particular story is an ode to Tokyo, the city of urban loneliness. The question will always be there but we need to press forward. Time waits for no one, it will tick away no matter what you do so make everything count. What if?
By the way, Inio Asano's current ongoing, Dead Dead Demon's Dededededestruction, and Akane Torikai's curent ongoing, Saturn Return, are being published in the same magazine, Big Comic Spirits. I think that's super qt. I am, of course, not reading either of them😅 I heard Demon's Dedededededededededededestruction went on hiatus a lot and Saturn Return isn't licensed in english and the scanlation stopped early. I read at my own pace and and I want to properly experience a story instead of forgetting stuff as I go about my life. If you lost your reading list when md went down and you're panicking because you were reading 100 manga... take this time to restart and just... take things slow. Stories are wonderful, don't make them titles in your list of "completed", experiencing them should be memorable, you owe it to them. The roses look beautiful, but you should also try smelling them.
Then again, don't let me dictate how you live your life, I just... don't like doing things just to say I've done them.
Moving onto his wife, I wanna touch on her note at the end of this story. No, not the song she was listening to on repeat when she drew this story, the less said about that the better (Why have you forsaken me, Akane? why?!) but I wanna talk about her criticism on the quality of the art. Now, it's pretty common for an artist to have issues with her past work but her issue stems from the fact that it's an early story and she had yet to create and define her own style. Compared to her later work, even the previous story in this collection, her lines are very thin all throughout the story, and her layouts are less defined, more... shoujo-esque, if you will, there is no space between her panels and the panels themselves have very thin walls. It fits the story though. It's always fun seeing an artist evolve and find their own style, that's something very unique to manga, because they start out early and because they're usually not fanboys trying to ape another artist, and because the editors usually don't interfere there and only give slight suggestions... except for popular manga magazines, the editor takes on a more "co-writer" role, but other than that, mangaka usually bounce ideas off their editors, they provide an outside opinion before the outside can read the work.
No saltiness this week but I must mention the fact that we are getting Minoru Furuya in english, it's Ciguatera and I urge everyone to buy it, even if your opinion on Ciguatera is that it's the weakest of his works, because if this sells well we're gonna get more Minoru Furuya in english. No release date as of now.
And another chapter of Water. These are pretty short, light on text and fairly easy to edit. Ch2 was done by a group that's still active and have their own website, ch3 appeared in Secret Comics Japan iirc, either way, it's been scanlated so here's ch4.
