I think I read about half of this one in miscellaneous time while getting lunch and things like that, before then I got caught by the bug one lovely rainy Sunday morning (the first of Fall?), where I’d taken my phone to bed after turning off the alarm instead of leaving it far away so I’d get up like I meant to, but then it worked out since I ended up reading Harta instead of scrolling through an algorithm and it just felt like the nice thing I wanted to do at the time and so I read right through the rest. I’d been getting a liiittle bit too frequent about associating the magazine with going out and sitting and drinking, so it was nice with this one to read the whole thing sober and make sure I remembered that really, the reading itself is more fun that way (and not bounded by when you start not following things so perfectly…).

Some highlights:

The weird thing about this issue is that there’s absolutely nothing to preview in the last issue! No 新連載 and no 特別読み切り! Go figure! It’s always interesting how the magazine ebbs and flows… not that long ago I would have said I felt like it could really use a handful of new series. Now the tide really does seem high on that front, especially since a lot of the recent new ones seem to have gone with the every-month schedule. So it makes some sense an issue might be a little over-stuffed even without fancy new things to advertise. Of course – I probably would have been mildly miffed if this was a new issue I had to look forward to instead of the last intermediate step before I finally catch up again!

I thought the action in this chapter of 香港ネクロポリス by 越谷美咲 was really cool! This is also the chapter where I belatedly realized the chapter titles are almost definitely going to all be Hong Kong movie references (last chapter was “Election” but the story deals heavily with material inspired quite directly from the movie Election so it would have fit anyway), which is about the least surprising thing ever really.

煙と蜜 by 長蔵ヒロコ renews serialization this month. Very happy for the author’s health, not necessarily completely thrilled to have the profoundly mixed feelings return. Still holding out hope 猫のまにまに will be back someday…

Still don’t completely know what to make of 心霊写真密売マニュアル by 池袋万里 as there’s quite a bit of stuff going on in it, but I thought this bit in particular was really cool and played to the strengths of the art style.

I enjoyed the vibe of the newest member of the litany of side characters in ハクメイとミコチ by 樫木祐人!