September’s Harta!

This one, as with the previous volume, suffered from my being torn between wanting to rush through it to get to the final Dungeon Meshi chapter but also being behind to start out with from business early in the year, and being preoccupied with my October trip to Japan. In the end I ended up reading up to the Dungeon Meshi finale, then (after accidentally spoiling myself on a wrestling tournament I was also trying to catch up on after tweeting about finishing Dungeon Meshi) ended up not reading any further until after the trip.

The Dungeon Meshi ending was real good! Definitely a planned one, and I look forward to someday hearing what Ryoko Kui’s going to do next. I hope the anime debuting at the start of next year brings a lot more people to this lovely series!

I’ll flip through and see if I recall anything else of note in this issue…

There’s one 新連載 this issue (it says it’ll be for a short period): 本なら売るほど by 児島青. This one I believe is picking up from a 読切 I liked enough to mention before so that’s neat! It’s about a proprietor of a bookstore, and I bet it’ll come with frequent real world book recommendations.

I was highly amused by this chapter of キラキラとギラギラ by 嵐田佐和子 and its premise of a showdown that’s either a date or a duel and no one can quite tell which, complete with intense festival game action.

One additional cool thing is that on the Harta Alt website, a two-parter I really liked in the magazine, 黒巫鏡談 by 戸川四餡 is being reserialized to then be continued into something longer! It’s about a naive third-rate Japanese horror novelist traveling to occupied Korea to research Korean folk magic and getting wrapped up in something more than he bargained for. I think the historical setting is neat and well-handled so far, and I’m excited to see it continue. I’ve been keeping up with all the series on the website and I’ve been enjoying all of them quite a bit (although it can hamper from catching up in the magazine to remember there’s a new week’s chapter on the website I should get to first), but they have been removing chapters except the first and most recent one for the series, alas, so if this series sounds interesting to you, please check it out now! There’s also some pretty nice one shots from Harta authors.