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Nurse Angel Ririka SOS reader contest (Ribon April 1997)

#ikeno koi #koi ikeno #nurse angel ririka sos #ririka sos #ribon #so cute

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Ribon December 1987 issue telephone card giveaway

#ribon #ikeno koi #hiiragi aoi #mizusawa megumi #urakawa masaru #okada amin #honda keiko #i'm completely beside myself over this page it's so beautiful

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I received a package from Japan today and it contained this totally random clipping from Ribon with very early art by Ikeno drawn for an apron giveaway. It's hard to see, but the fat man on skiis is drawn by Ikeno and she drew 31 of these little guys for the calendar printed on the apron! This is from January 1981, when she started her first serialized work Mai-chan non stop. Never seen or even heard about this before!

I'll be taking a break with my collecting for a while, but this package contained a bunch of really nice Ikeno art so I'll update my site one of the coming days. :) And then, to start saving money...

#ikeno koi #koi ikeno

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a very nice person asked me if I could rank or talk about the different art styles throughout Tokimeki's run and what my favorites were, and I'd LOVE TO DO THIS, but I realized yesterday that I'm dragging my feet because if I post a ranking of my favorite Ikeno art styles through the years, maybe to every single other person in the world it'd be like

#and this would make me sad #because i have a lot of feelings on ikeno's art ok #but i'll do it! soon!!!! #text post #but for now i need to go do household chores

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I keep seeing people who work within the N. American manga industry spreading the myth that the Year 24 Group were the ones who established women mangaka working in shojo as the norm and it seems very strange to me. Idk I guess I understand why fans and amateur manga historians would buy into it, especially if they're not fluent enough in Japanese to do research into it themselves but I'm a bit alarmed by industry professionals doing it. What do you make of it?

I dunno who's saying this, but to be entirely honest it's not like all people who happen to work for North American manga publishers are magically more knowledgable about the history of manga, so I wouldn't be particularly surprised! If you're a proof reader, or a PR person, or a graphic designer, and you end up working for Viz, that doesn't mean you'll be have more interest in researching the history of manga... and even if you're a translator, it doesn't necessarily mean you're fluent in Japanese language or Japanese culture and history.

As fans (or more generally as people on the internet) I think we do need to evaluate "industry professionals" individually, in any case. Anyone can claim to "work in the medical profession" on twitter while being, say, a filing clerk at a hospital.

(I don't want to say anything definitive about something I haven't seen myself, though, so I'd be curious if anyone wanted to send me examples.)

#replies #text post #anonymous

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aww is your spock/bones shipping old or new? i like them too, sometimes better than k/s

:D Why hello fellow fan! Spock/Bones is a new ship for me, although now that I see it I don't know how I could have missed it for so many years??? I've been a Trek fan since I was a kid (my mother is a fan) but it was only very recently on a TOS rewatch, more specifically during "The Immunity Syndrome" and this moment

that my brain went HNGH Bones phsycially stops Spock from touching that button... the stares... the only thing Spock asks before a certain-death mission is for the man he loves Bones to wish him luck, although Spock doesn't even believe in that illogical sentimental stuff... Bones stubbornly refusing to give Spock the only thing he asks for... UNTIL SPOCK HAS LEFT and then he FINALLY whispers

like WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE TWO MEN WHY DON'T THEY JUST FUCK KISS ALREADY!?!?!?!?!

And after that I spent every break at work looking at gifs until my provider was like "um we're not halfway into the month and you've used up 80% of your data, are you ok?" haha. And honestly every single scene they're in together reads to me as subtext now???

↑ really, Doctor? really? after what he did to you last night

↑ the way Bones sits

↑ the come-hither flick of the fingers

↑ even more wordless come-hither

↑ should evil Spock have ravaged Bones? Yes. The answer is yes.

The mystery isn't so much why I ship it as why I never shipped it before, since I've been into antagonistic old man yaoi for as long as I remember AND Bones was always my favorite TOS character AND my favorite thing in all of TOS canon has always been Spock passing his soul into Bones and the (hilarious) hell Bones goes through in The Search for Spock because of it!

↑ married for 40 years

ANYWAY yes, good ship, wish I'd shipped it earlier. Apologies for the long post, thank you for the ask and thank you for letting me ramble about this ship at length haha. (K/S is okay, I don't ship it personally because while I do like Kirk as a character I don't find him all that engaging, but obviously the OT3 is strong in TOS.)

I'm also currently rewatching DS9 (my favorite Trek) with a friend, and while I don't ship anything passionately in that my favorite is probably Quark/Odo, so yeah, I have A Type.

#replies #text post #gif #lots of gifs #off topic #star trek #crude language sorry sorry #but also deforest kelley is both an excellent actor and a hot old man so

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i got a job and i also got money back in taxes so you know what that means ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

(tokimeki stuff. it means i'm picking up an excessive amount of tokimeki stuff)

(i've picked up a bunch of ribon and ribon original issues with rare-ish tokimeki stuff in them, and i feel myself inching closer and closer to completing my collection of ikeno furoku. i also really want to complete my collection of zen'in presents... but the items that pop up for sale are almost always things i already own :/ like there's three aira zen'in i would love to pick up, i'd even pay pretty high prices for them, but they just never show up! it makes me a bit sad because marmalade boy/hime-chan no ribbon/tenshi nanka ja nai zen'in from the same time period show up periodically, but i guess much fewer people ordered the aira zen'in? ;_; no 90s kids wanted it?? and don't even get me started on ririka and nanoka zen'in, i missed picking up two of them because i figured they'd pop up again but noooooo they're nowhere to be seen now??? ugh)

anyway not to be weird on main but i'm obsessed with this ship

#so that is my life how is yours #text post #gif

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i didn’t post a lot about what i did when i visited japan last year (aside from attending the tokimeki exhibition), but i did visit a lot of other retro manga spots as well, including the reconstructed tokiwa-so and the related shops in the neighborhood. in particular, i visited “tokiwa-so-doori oyasumi-dokoro”, a two-story shop and small museum, where they’ve reconstructed terada hiroo’s room in tokiwa-so, display a large number of signed shikishi from manga artists who have visited, and sell a large number of tokiwa-so merch, including amazing mizuno hideko merch and books!

so obviously i couldn’t hold back and bought a bunch. center top is a self-published book containing autobiographical texts by mizuno, and it’s a great read particularly because mizuno was the sole woman at tokiwa-so and has a distinct pov on the happenings there, and also because she hung out with ishonomori shotaro and akatsuka fujio a lot, giving us insights that are different from the fujiko fujio-focused pov that many texts on tokiwa-so take.

the postcards on the left depict the life at tokiwa-so with adorable cats, and i had to buy the whole set but i’m especially SO fond of this one:

akatsuka fujio, mizuno hideko, and ishinomori shotaro as cats, staring at ONE dried fish wondering who gets to have it!! such a cute moment, and probably accurate to the pretty poor lives the artists led at tokiwa-so (except ishinomori, who was super popular almost right off the bat).

another amazing thing is that the tokiwa-so sticker sheet (bottom right) was printed BY MIZUNO, BY HAND, on her HOME PRINTER:

like, how could i NOT buy this!?!?!?

in general the reconstructed tokiwa-so and surrounding shops are amazing, and i’d recommend any fan of historical manga to visit. if you do go to the “oyasumi-dokoro”, also make sure to look up when you enter — the lampshade hanging right above you has been decorated by mizuno herself. amazing!!!

#mizuno hideko #text post #tokiwa so

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Kuwabara Mizuna of Mirage of Blaze fame saying recently on twitter that Cobalt (the teen girl light novel magazine/imprint of Shueisha) received a bunch of male editors from Playboy in the 90s, and at first the editors were all confused because they'd never worked with this type of publishing before, but ultimately this experience was good for the writers because the male editors brought a different world view which was very stimulating, and also she believes because they came from Playboy, they let the writers try new things as long as this new thing seemed like it'd be fun.

#thoughts on manga #in a roundabout way #text post #mostly interesting to me in the light of discussion i've seen about male editors for shojo media being awful by default #which again i don't think so

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I have this pet theory that the main difference between shueisha manga and akita shoten manga is editors. for better or worse jump manga come out of the gate more workshopped than champion manga, and sometimes champion manga turn out to emit MASSIVE POWERS because of this lack of workshopping (macaroni horenso, beastars) but jump manga still have a higher success rate and reach higher summits.

on a more personal note I do often read the first few chapters of akita shoten manga and think "this has a great premise and the artist obviously has talent, why did the editors not actually, like, edit this" and become frustrated (beastars, requiem of the rose king, children of the whales off the top of my head). HOWEVER I also sometimes read kodansha manga and think "this is not a work of art this is a pitch for a tv show" so there's also that (i.e. they are nothing but workshop).

#thinking about this mostly because i often do see people say editors are in the way of manga artists #and exist to be elitist gatekeepers who will deny the manga artist's vision #while i do not think this at all #it's obviously more complicated than 'all editors are awesome and do great jobs' though since editors are just people #thoughts on manga #text post

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The covers of the new edition of T.P. Bon being released next month are just so, so, so cute; I love the colors and the simple design and of course I love the characters, particularly vol 2 with Ream and Buyoyon in pink. Normally I'd just pick them up along with other things I'm getting from Japan, but they're also promising ANOTHER deluxe edition release in July so I won't be able to decide which edition to pick up until then =_= I haven't even gotten my hands on the sf short stories deluxe editions yet, all ten volumes are on a ship somewhere in the South China Sea probably.

Bon is getting a Netflix anime treatment sometime this year (hence the new manga releases). It's a sci-fi series about teen time travel agents saving the lives of ordinary people throughout history. I don't normally watch anime but I'll probably check it out; if it's anything like the manga it'll be a solid series with really good historical research, fun time travel shenanigans, and a lot of moral quandaries about human lives. Maybe if this does well for Netflix they'll do Mojako next...

#t. p. bon #tp bon #fujiko f fujio #of fujiko's major shonen sf series which is to say bon + 21emon + mojako #mojako is my favorite #but bon might be the one i've read the most times #and remember the best #it has distinct historical settings in each chapter and clear story structures and it's just well-paced and well-written honestly! #also it has these awful truly awful depictions of historical atrocities like witch hunts... #and also some socially conscious stories about american slaves and whale hunting and the crusades

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oh no Inoue Nagi is a Tokimeki fan, why did no one tell me

#tokimeki tonight #nogizaka46 #inoue nagi

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ranze nendoroid

ranze nendoroid in blue-striped middle school uniform

ranze nendoroid in blue-striped middle school uniform with yoko-dog add-on

#text post #🤔 #i mean i kept saying i want an artbook and after 10 years an artbook materialized so #this is my next one #this already exists vividly in my mind #tokimeki tonight

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#tokimeki tonight #ikeno koi #koi ikeno #CUTE

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Tokimeke Tonight ch. 21 -- Ikeno Koi

#tokimeki tonight #ikeno koi #koi ikeno #ribon #color pages #not included in exhibition catalogue

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Previous anon - the context was someone talking about "ladies comics" mentioning some of the shoujo controversy, and someone in the comments saying "Yeah and it's because of that all shoujo are boring romances now, they're too afraid of any controversial content" Didn't ring entirely true to me lol, thought I'd check

Thank you so much for the clarification, anon! And well, I dunno, I guess you could say Sho-Comi in particular went back to being a magazine mostly running "basic HS romance" after this backlash, so in that very narrow context it might be said to be somewhat true? But saying "all shojo" is boring romance "now" is wildly inaccurate, I'd say!

Also, I realize stuff like Kaikan Phrase are so-bad-they're-good cult classics in some circles today, but I don't think you can make a genuine argument that it was some sort of genre-defying, groundbreaking innovator... but maybe that's just me.

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Saw a reddit post claiming that the reason Shoujo manga lost it's "edge" in the 2010s/2020s is because of controversy in the 2000s for shoujo manga being inappropriate for children. is this anywhere close to the truth?

lol that's certainly one way of putting it? It's true that there was a big backlash against some shojo manga around this time, because magazines like Shojo Comic (Sho-Comi) was running a lot of quite, uh, sexually explicit series like the infamous Kaikan Phrase and I'm in love with my little sister, and was getting a lot of sales and hype out of titillating its young teen audience. (I answered a related ask about that here.) So that part is true. Whether you think shojo manga lost its "edge" because it scaled back on using sexual titillation to sell magazines is a matter of interpretation, I guess? Personally I very much believe those series that received the backlash were bad, not because they were sexual but because they were just... bad, and shojo manga is in a better place now.

(I'm actually curious who said this and in what context, but not enough to go to reddit.)

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