Happy Figure Doujinshi, Regretful Figure Purchase
It’s hard to bundle up irrelevant topics into one fell swoop, so I’m not going to try.
First thing first–Happy Soda’s Super Rats is somewhat of a photographer, going at it in his home studio and snapping away. While what I may heap upon him seems little more than empty praise, I think the value of what fancy words I have for his work-product is at least as much as the $25 I spent on it.
The specific work product, beyond his figure blog, is a self-published photo book of some of the select photos he took over the course of his figure reviews. I would like to think he covered a wide variety of selections as far as picking out pictures to put in the book. But as much as the book features high rez figure porn, the book contain Super Rat’s arrangement, notes and random focus on different figures that tickles his pickles. YMMV on that one.
Besides a few amateur-ish flaws, there’s not a whole lot to say about the book. If you like the pictures on Happy Soda, then getting this so-called doujinshi is not going to disappoint. If you like figures of anime/game/whatever girls in various states of undress, then you will probably like both.
The doujinshi is made available from Lulu, which is a print-on-demand vendor with plants in Europe, US, Australia, and elsewhere I don’t know. Not sure about exactly where. This means you can get it with a fairly low shipping cost in much of the world outside the US. I got the book from them relatively quickly and the cost is reasonable for this sort of thing. The paper quality is fine although I sort of hoped the cover material is a bit better.
Again, the book is not perfect and it’s easy to look at it and come up with a dozen ways to improve it. But, it delivers what you expect, so it is a good thing.
Regrettably, the book is on sale from October 21 to October 28, so you really have no time left to make this purchase. Well, it’s his loss, although it’s not unusual for really popular doujinshi to go on multiple runs.
[You can grab a PDF of it as preview (it’s not 100.00% the same as the paper product, but it’s close. Speaking of which, the shot with Haruka’s lower half in the book had less of an effect than seeing it in 4-page quadrants as a PDF). ]
The second bit I wanted to talk about is 5cm/s. This topic keeps coming up not only because it’s worth talking about, but it just happens to be something so thought provoking that despite the relatively few people who got to see it, a higher percent of the viewers had to vent? And venting we did. People wrote a lot about it way-back-when. All the more it seemed appropriate that a word can simply nail it to the wall.
The third bit, going back to figure and regret, is this hasty purchase. Granted the experience itself was/is valuable (first time ordering from Kid Nemo), it reminded me why I ought to stick to his drawn stuff and not falter towards the flame that is Tony Taka’s luscious character designs, rendered in three dimensions.
As you may know, Kotobukiya has been doing some limited distribution runs in the United States. This means North American retailers can get their hands on figures at a large discount since they skip over the “importer” middleman entirely. A $65 Elwing figure can be had for $45. Yeah, you can get a bad case of regret if you got that $65 figure instead.
What’s amusing is I knew all about this in an indirect way. I just didn’t do dilligence before I pressed the confirm button. So now I will rely on what makes Kid Nemo different than many other retailers–not its higher price point, but supposedly existant customer service. We will see how it turns out!
Yea, you should have asked around bout that Koto bit before hitting the trigger ;)
…live and learn, live and learn…
I’m looking forward to getting super rats’ book, but it hasn’t arrived yet >_>
When you said you were going to tear me one, I was worried that something went horribly wrong. ^^;
Nah, I just want to set your expectation lower ;)