August’s Harta came out surprisingly early in the month, but I ended up reading it surprisingly late, only finishing the second half this morning, a few days after the September Harta’s already come out. There were two specific reasons for that:
Reason #1: When this came out I’d been thinking that I wanted to stop just posting direct links to my notes on notion as the way I do forum posts, so as to put more thought into what I actually say on forums and to try to transition more into more thoughtful, fully public-facing formats in general, rather than just letting my notes which were always meant to just be private, be a poor stand in for sharing things in public. And so I thought what I would try to do would be to move the (already relatively public-oriented and polished) Harta notes over to the blog portion of my notion site, and update the format of them to be a bit more comprehensive, so it could be kind of like a month-to-month version of that one Harta rundown post I made. Which might still be what I want to do! … but it was also going to be a bunch of work, and so that ended up meaning I procrastinated on reading the issue at all.
Reason #2: Then after that I came to be in a mood where my focus shifted towards very frantically trying to read through my physical 積ん読 piles, which meant that stuff I also want to read but that I own digitally (like Harta) went neglected.
Anyway, now while both of those reasons are still in play, I’d say my present mood is that they’re more in the background than the foreground, so that and being so behind on it meant I got to enjoy an evening of reading Harta at last! And I did enjoy it – I think it’s a particularly good issue.
There’s a very interesting, fairly significant format change this issue! The八咫烏杯 manga contest winners are now interspersed through the magazine instead of all being bunched at the end. I think this is generally a good change! I’d long been in the habit of heavily skimming or outright skipping the contest winners because hitting them last after reading so much manga to get there was always a bit draining and made them feel less well-paced than they should be. Whereas I’m always happy to see other 読み切り in the magazine, despite in theory the contest-winners being completely indistinguishable from non-contest 読み切り. So this way, it feels like it will be a whole lot easier to just treat them like any other short story and give them the time they deserve (although it is one other smaller factor in my getting through this more slowly). I don’t remember if this was new this issue (probably not) but in general it seems like they’re also being more informative overall with the little blurbs in the table of contents, highlighting last installments etc. and not just 新連載, which is convenient.
Speaking of 新連載, there’s one this issue: アルケミックガール×バーサーカーボーイ by 松賀諒真. It’s been a bit now since I read it, but it seems to be an odd Sengoku-era story reminding me most of 九国のジュウシ. The art style has potential.
I quite liked this third chapter of ファンシー革命 by 犬島ななこ. I thought that it showcased well the series’ potential by establishing some good character beats (with I think a supporting character we hadn’t really met yet, although reading in installments makes it surprisingly easy to be completely wrong about that kind of thing) while also including fairly interesting information about what designing for a company making cute goods entails. A lot of strong facial expressions and moments really sell the character work – it could end up a series with a very endearing cast.
I loved いやはや熱海くん by 田沼朝 as usual. This installment seemed particularly long to me (but I might have imagined it), with
During the dinner scene I also noted Tanuma’s excellent glasses work.
