I read April’s Harta in pieces throughout August. I’ve gotten used to reading stuff on bookwalker on my phone while out and about lately, and more and more I’m tending to associate Harta with reading that way, like earlier in the month when my internet was out for an extended period of time and I was using wifi around town. It has its positives and negatives compared to the only way I used to read Bookwalker stuff (in bed on my tablet held horizontally for the two-page spread), but overall I think it’s a nice and pleasant additional method. I finally caught up completely on clearing out my todo list of review notes after almost completely neglecting those for the whole year to date, which makes catching back up on Harta the second most pressing catch-up goal that would make me feel more happily abreast of things if I were to achieve it. But I also recently have been feeling some of that feeling of urgently needing to focus on clearing out physical backlogs welling up again, so I’m not too sure if I’ll blitz through the remaining issues too quickly or not…

In any case, some highlights!

This issue opens with a 新連載: 心霊写真密売マニュアル by 池袋万里. It would be about a month since I read this, so I don’t remember it too great, but it has an interesting premise involving (actual) ghost photography, and a mix of comedy and drama that includes at least one good laugh moment I remember. I was particularly impressed at how polished and distinctive the art style is! Something about the shading style in particular is really cool, with lots of areas of soft grays punctuated by a few of deep black. Especially for the author’s first serial, it seems impressive. Looking her up, it seems she had a short in Harta 85 and 99, and they don’t seem to have made any particularly strong impression on WaniKani Harta club readers (myself included) who have gotten there yet, but although I didn’t reread them, I did flip through them out of curiosity and it’s cool to see just how much that art style developed and improved over that time! Makes me want to root for the author, even if it remains to be seen if I’ll be all that into the series or not.

香港ネクロポリス by 越谷美咲 and 船長、問題がありません！ by 佐藤宮, the two 新連載 from the previous issue that I was interested in and enjoyed, both have second chapters in this issue, and I remember belatedly realizing that that means both are every-issue series (極楽にはまだ早い too for that matter)! Neat! I’m up for that!

The 船長、問題がありません！ chapter involves the captain’s modern Japanese very fish-forward palette clashing with the diet of 1600s British sailors. I remember thinking surely there were practical reasons sailors at the time weren’t procuring sashimi-ready seafood from the ocean like is portrayed as possible for comedic effect here, but hey.

瑠璃の宝石 by 渋谷圭一郎 has an extra installment here because of the anime adaptation, and I thought it was a particularly good chapter, involving a nice example of the kind of interesting natural mystery-solving that goes into this kind of science.