Today’s deck is the Phantasma Tarot.
It’s good! The licensed ones I’ve used the last couple of days were kinda cumbersome to shuffle to this one felt really nice to use.
Today’s reading says that a disappointment that feels unfair is getting things stuck, but I’d take it instead as an acknowledgement/warning of how I can get derailed by simmering when I get disappointed in something.
Man, I’ve been writing these posts at around 9PM lately and my internet has been INSUFFERABLY slow, posts that would usually take half an hour at most end up taking almost two while I wait for images to be attached.
As the photo up there suggests I did some extra rearranging in one of the walls. I was pleasantly surprised at how I’m also able to fit photos. I’m thinking which third one to print so it’s all lined up.
By the way, the melobooks prints are interesting because they were from an OC Festival… well, it was called うちのこ something something, but the idea is the same. OCs I recognized from illustrators I know. Cool Stuff.
Speaking of prints, there’s a couple of city photos I took last week that I haven’t been able to print because I couldn’t find my small camera and, as expected, the camera was in plain view but underneath a clear file full of socuments so it stopped existing.
Today this manga I had been looking forward to arrived. It’s called 社長と酒と星, stylized in the spine as “The president drinking under the stars”.
If you take the premise alone it’s nothing too crazy. You’ve got a calm and serious guy, an a company superior with huge tits that’s scary, but when they meet in a park at night the superior is goofy and ameniable.
At face value it’s nothing you cannot find easily nowadays. Hell, I can go to my bookshelf and find… at least four manga with bits of this premise in there and one I always forget but it’s the one with the office lady with big tits and hair in a bun. I know it exists but I’ve never bought it.
So what makes this one work?
The fact that every component is cranked up to a million.
“Scary” doesn’t mean “Beautiful woman that looks at you angry”, it means “Beautiful woman that will put you in an Argentine Backbreaker if you miff her ever so slightly”.
“Goofy” doesn’t mean “from serious to moody”, it means finding her passed out drunk in a park with a bunch of home appliances because she got it in her head she wanted to learn to cook.
The relationship evolution is also… not necessarily fast, but very upfront and even understandable. On one side you’ve got 37 year old Kenichi who is a very “battered down by the world” sort of office worker and he has a strong admiration for the titular president Reina who is 24 years old and has more determination and work ethic than anyone in the office. Of course the manga opens with him finding Reina in a park drunk and claiming she wants to become a baby which puts into perspective for him just how much effort Reina puts into being the strong president figure.
Reina meanwhile feels like she’s surrounded by drones and clowns at the best of times and she’s in a damned if you do damned if you don’t situation where she’s either treated badly because she inherited her position, is young, AND a woman; or she ends up isolated because to get anything done she has to be ruthless. So Kenichi being one of the few actually competent hands on deck and one that treated her like a proper superior without question from day one made her have her eye on him for a while.
Now, the age gap mentioned is also interesting for a few reasons.
The first one is that Kenichi doesn’t feel Ojiisan-coded, if I told you this is about a 37 year old man and a 24 year old woman I wouldn’t blame you if a very specific kind of story COUGHTawawaOnMondayCOUGH came to mind. Yes, I know 37 isn’t Ojiisan age, but believe you me I’ve seen some dudes call themselves Ojiisan after 35 and seal their fate.
THE POINT IS that the whole thing doesn’t feel the specific way things with that age gap tend to feel. I’d argue the ages are mainly relevant in the context of what each character is there to accomplish. Reina needs to be 24 to have that element of “she tries so hard but in the end she’s still a young woman with young woman concerns” and Kenichi needs to be 37 for the “I’m tired and demotivated and there’s a whole new generation I don’t understand in front of me but I still have over half of my life expectancy ahead”.
And you know what’s the wildest part of this is? How sexually tame this is all in all.
So here’s some context: The artist, Zurikishi is someone I’ve followed for YEARS. Their Fantia’s earliest posts are from late 2021 so AT LEAST from then (it’s been frozen so I’ll point you to their Fanbox also). And for extra context in case the name didn’t make immediate sense, there’s a pun in their user handle because online titfuck-obsessed people call themselves “(pai)zuri kichi”. “Kichi” is… oversimplifying a LOT a derogatory version of “Maniac”, like, there’s Train Otaku who calmly like trains and then there’s Train Kichi who have almost been ran over twice every week.
So first of all: Mad respect for keeping the user handle. Second: That’s where the joke comes in as Kichi (maniac) is replaced with Kishi (knight).
So with that context in mind it’s shocking that the panel up there is the most explicit thing in the whole volume, especially with all the advances Reina tries to pull on Kenichi (which interestingly, are mostly rejected because they always happen while she’s drunk), it’s almost like all the horny energy has a different outlet so focus can be put in something else.
It also makes sense because I’d argue, if anything, this manga is an outlet for a different kind of energy.
Nowadays Zurikishi is known mostly (before this manga, I mean) for his Half Succubus character, which started as just another set of illustrations but quickly evolved into a bunch of wholesome picture sets of a single father and his adopted daughter. So having a full mainstream-published manga feels like a proper outlet for all the storytelling that was being pent up.
And as the past couple paragraphs illustrate, I’m so happy to see them be published like this.
Zurikishi isn’t the first one I follow that went from doujin/porn illustrator I follow into published mangaka, and hopefully they’re not the last. But what makes this case special is remembering when they started, remembering when they only had their OC Jibi Sakura and they barely colored things.
Having clear memories of when they only did storylines one full illustration at a time before suddenly BAM fully paneled pages.
And not just that but the fact that the end result is FUN! It got me actual chuckles instead of the slight sensible chuckles something like Small Senpai causes.
It’s not just the pride either, but that constant reminder of how much people can improve in a given amount of time, which is an extra valuable thing to remember nowadays when skill and skill-learning is starting to be seen as optional.
It’s not like I spent all day thinking about this mind you, but it was a slow day and this improptu review is honestly the most insteresting thing about it.