Most of this one I remember I read through moments of incidental downtime on a Monday where I was getting a lot of work done to try to rebuild self-esteem and feel productive after what ended up a crummy weekend, so on the one hand it worked pretty well and was a pleasant component of the day, but on the other I was still in at least half of a bad mood and so was perhaps particularly uninvested in trying to absorb more from this issue where maybe I should have been more.
The cover story is (I think) a talk interview between ツージーQ and 湯浅学, both of whom I only very very vaguely know as AX-involved people of some kind. (I think TooZy has done 連載 for them, and Yuasa does one of the weirder columns that I don’t understand? And it seems like they’re both music industry people of some kind?) This kind of context is the kind of thing that only bleeds in very slowly when starting to follow a magazine like this, and I don’t really think that this specific feature is where I’m going to understand it all, so I did not pay much attention at all to it.
スローシナリオ by モリノダイチ ends this issue! This series gets sentimental points from me for beginning around the earliest issue of AX I read, and for being the most like, directly “contemporary gay artist has feelings about the world” manga that I’ve come across, being a portrait of a young artist having feelings and trying to work through some things about his identity and the people and society around him. I’m surprised that it doesn’t appear to have been collected! (though from 青林工藝舎 it would be presumably physical only and harder to share or reread anyway). I don’t know how polished or cohesive it feels as a complete story, but it certainly makes me curious about Morino’s work from here.
ドブリン’s story this issue covers way darker trauma than usual.
That shocked me at first, but I think it handled it gracefully enough in the end? ドブリン’s work does after all always to one extent or another involve deceptively complex or bitter emotions. (And I think it’s a potentially noteworthy detail that the protagonist seems to shift to an androgynous gender presentation in a way that mirrors a shift of the author’s own along those lines – not to say that the protagonist is the author of course, just that something is happening / being communicated, and it’s not just salacious material for the sake of it).
This installment of まどの一哉’s tokusatsu-y comic was amusingly perhaps slightly blasphemous.
One memorable work later in the magazine that potentially deserved more attention that I just did not have the energy to deal with at the time was the first of I think a two parter called ZARATHUSTRA・EX・MACHINA by 高山和雅, a sci-fi story with a lot of nudity, lengthy explanations, and an art style that reminds me of… I guess Shintaro Kago mixed with a bit of Atsushi Kaneko is what I’m thinking of? If I had more energy, I don’t really think I would have LIKED it more mind you… but I think I could have engaged with it at least a little bit more than I did.