I’d been wanting to buy the original manga for a while, but the tankoubon were too expensive so I never picked one up. This time I was just rounding out an order and grabbed one volume: Onii-chan wa Oshimai! (お兄ちゃんはおしまい) There’s actually an official Chinese version of this manga too, titled 《不做欧尼酱了》. Sure, “おしまい” in that title does carry the sense of “quitting / throwing in the towel,” but after reading it, the original manga seems to use it with that mocking, teasing “he’s done for, he’s finished” flavor as well… Anyway, once the manga arrived I finally had time to read it. It’s the first tankoubon, so the content is neither too much nor too little, and I was genuinely surprised by how good it was.

Buying this was kind of an afterthought, honestly—I’m not a Shoji diehard. I just have some inexplicable fondness for the characters he did in Yuzusoft games. Mostly because the girls he draws split into two styles, “elegant” and “cute,” and he nails both. Neither has that gratuitous horny vibe. It’s all very fresh and clean. And it wasn’t expensive, so I grabbed it alongside the CDs.

My reading history goes back to elementary school. When my dad was ordering magazines, he subscribed to one called Children’s Comics — probably the earliest Chinese magazine of its kind, and the channel through which some early Japanese manga got introduced to China, Doraemon among them. But the climate was different back then. It was a domestic magazine after all, and 90% of the content was Chinese comics — plenty of them drawn by elementary and middle schoolers themselves. I was too young to understand any of it. I read comics just for the noise, and I had pretty gross taste: if a comic had shit-and-piss gags or other vulgar nonsense, I’d be delighted and drag my parents or friends over to look at it with me… thinking back on it, I was a terrible kid. Apparently Children’s Comics is somehow still alive, though several of its old editors-in-chief are probably dead by now. Honestly I liked those old geezers’ art — the stories were a hundred times better than today’s domestic animation, and a lot of them came with their own snark, a sort of middle-aged-man teasing style that fit the times. One more thing worth mentioning: Children’s Comics seems to have planted a flag for me. I happened to find out one of the top students in my class read it too, and I used that as an excuse to talk to her a few times. And then… nothing ever came of it…