Dousei Jidai - Vol. 1 Ch. 5 - Aquatic Flower

[MangaDex]

 

[shoneniscrap]

yeah new dousei jidai!!!!!

wait... @cicerociceronis are you working with @Choolastre?
Two great projects together. Talk about patrician taste!

 

[Choolastre]

@shoneniscrap Yes, Cicero is our Typesetter.

 

[Doomroar]

"I can't get married, i have pollen allergies."

I will take bullshit excuses for 500, Alex.

 

[Choolastre]

@Doomroar Although you are not wrong that it seems as a bullshit excuse, her sickness is way more serious than a hay fever. She is sick, and back in that time (no so long actually) weak and sick women had difficulties to get married.

The series relies on many cultural concepts that seem exaggerated for our times, this being one. But the main pivot of the series, is how much Kyoko is affected by not getting married while still living together with Jiro.

 

[Dundun123]

Wow that's some poetry. Lovely. I bet it must've been hard to translate. So thanks

 

[CiceroCiceronis]

@shoneniscrap glad you're enjoying 😎 I've got my eye on a number of interesting potential projects and potentially people willing to work with me to get this sort of stuff done, so I definitely hope I can bring more interesting manga to the table in the near future.

 

[StardustScream]

Whoa, is that double spread fully painted? His art is breathtaking, especially when you consider this is 1971... and this was published weekly iirc. Amazing.
Kamimura's title pages are always sooooo good

 

[sleepyknight]

@stardustscream, some 70's mangaka were really big on backgrounds. garo oneshots from the time tend to be really lovingly rendered as a rule, regardless of character design. and i remember being wowed by the attention to detail in ishinomori shotaro's work and he was like, mainstream. the same goes for mizuki shigeru, like his character designs are cartoonish, but his backgrounds are all starkly realistic. detailed rendering of backgrounds was almost a rule of the genre among the generation right after tezuka

 

[StardustScream]

@sleepyknight Yeah, but in the case of Ishinomori it's also a result of assistants and I recall reading that he'd give them some freedom sometimes to exert their creativity. Mizuki is the one that I really felt that with when reading Kitaro because most of it looks... okay and with minimal to no backgrounds and then there's some double page spread that looks incredible...and then back to okay, however if you look at his one shots he did for Garo they look so much better but obviously on a weekly series you need to cut corners and stuff so it's understandable but I don't feel like there's any of that in Dousei Jidai. Kamimura's sequential storytelling is very impressive but you could find good sequential storytelling in mainstream too, like Ashita no Joe, but even there the character designs are still that cartoony somewhat predictable art style that you see in most manga of the mid 60s to mid 70s, Kamimura on the other hand stands out, what I find most impressive about it is how fearless his lines are, he seems like he figured his style out early and never looked back and even in Garo with people like Yoshiharu Tsuge or Kuniko Tsurita doing some fantastic stuff, they were still trying to figure out their art style, you look at Ryoichi Ikegami and he needed some time to find his style because his early work on like Spider-man is very different from his signature style, and even when he found it he still needed time to develop it into what it is today, the only one that might match that fearlessness could be Sanpei Shirato but I can't say for sure because I haven't read Kamui yet but he kinda gives me that vibe even if his art is gritty and kinda sketchy. Kazuo Umezu does deserve a mention too because he comes out with Disappearing Classroom just a few years later and WOW! though I would say Umezu's sequential storytelling was never amazing and certainly not on the level of Kamimura or Tetsuya Chiba, his creativity and his pencils on the other hand were insane.
Still, as amazing as Tsuge or Seiichi Hayashi were, they weren't doing the weekly grind like Kamimura was with Dousei Jidai and that's what I find most impressive, he ends up doing a crazy amount of pages per month later on. Even if I don't think Kamimura was a better mangaka than them, experimenting with watercolors or whatever he was doing in the double page spread in this chapter just goes to show that he was an illustrator first and foremost and then a mangaka but his skills as a mangaka were still top notch. 70s manga scene was really damn cool.

 

[sleepyknight]

@StardustScream i agree! although what excites me the most about the 70's scene is the reverse of what you described as Kamimura's appeal- the growth of artists who were attempting to realize the full potential of the medium as they diverged more from orthodox utilization of artistic and narrative structures. thats why the primary appeal of this manga to me is as an example of this tendency, especially bc i don't feel prior manga had been lacking in terms of technique.

 

[DjAlexDubCheck]

https://mangadex.org/chapter/1007956/17