things we lost at dusk

I was thinking of picking up these aizoban editions of Tachikake Hideko's Hana-buranko yurete... (one of the major works of Ribon's otome-tique movement), but then I looked at some previews and it's only a few select title pages that are included in color, not all of them or the colored manga pages? I usually think that's fair enough for a regular release, but they're charging 3850 + 3630 yen for these?! Don't put out something pretending to be a "definitive" edition if you're not going to put in that effort, man. >(

it's a sub-par product they're trying to sell for more money by tricking people into thinking they're high quality. there's nothing wrong with glued spines in general, I'm not saying all random paperbacks should be made with coptic stitch or whatever (paperbacks being cheap and widely available to all is a good thing!), but if you're going to advertise your publication as a special, deluxe, high-quality product, you should back it up. and instead of being mad, fans are gobbling it up and asking for more!

haha I dunno if anything I've ever done can be categorized as "cozy", but thanks for the kind words, anon! as for why I deleted most of my posts, I think I'd been really tired of fandom for a while at that point. people feeling entitled to just take anything you share and pretend it's their own! people constantly spreading really dumb misinformation about manga and doubling down on it! people accusing you (and a bunch of people you've never spoken to) of conspiring against random BNFs you don't even care about! etc. I think I felt very unfairly scrutinized and villainized and didn't want to contribute anything to a community that made me feel that way, because why should I? but also, I'm not the most emotionally stable person and I periodically get an urge to burn everything down and go live as a hermit in the norwegian mountains and never have anything to do with any other living person again, so there's that. a combination of things!

i was helping my mother sort her yarn collection to throw out 4/5 of it when i randomly found this old "gentleman's alliance cross" furoku watch, haha. background info: my mother is a hoarder* and she used to sometimes pick up stuff i'd thrown away and keep it and hide it because she thought i was being "wasteful". i'm throwing it away now, but here are some photos if anyone is curious. having "real items" furoku is normal now, but this was back when furoku was transitioning from paper items to "real" things chiefly made out of plastic, and this would have been a highly hyped item. interesting from a manga magazine history perspective. you can see an image of the box here. another interesting thing is that these "real" items have basically zero worth now, while paper furoku of meiji-taisho-showa are still valued by collectors. this is a beautiful book about that.

edit: maybe I should warm up by just posting random crap text posts though? like let my mind and fingers wander? get back in the swing of things? maybe my aim is too high, like I feel I need to write a fully-articulated 10.000 word essay right out of the gate?

edited it

computer crashed, lost everything

visiting @glow-wine in munich and went to a regular bookstore to look at manga, and found this german edition of the super mario-kun special selection!

wracking my brain to think of something fun I've picked up lately and remembering these adorable early 80s Ikeno Koi ads that are so very otome-tique inspired (Mutsu A-ko and Tabuchi Yumiko in particular) and soooooo prettyyyyyy

and this adorable self-portrait of Ikeno relaxing in a bathtub ;_; these "manga joho" pages from vintage Ribon are so rare but I picked up a few I might like to share (I believe I left the earlier scans I shared public when I made most of my posts private because I feel like they have historical significance)