Kantoku - 5th Year Memorial

Reading Time: 4 minutes

I’ll start out by saying, this book was not what I expected. Not in a bad way, but I thought it would be something different. 5th Year Memorial is a 54 page collection of art work that Kantoku drew for his home page over the past 5 years.

I bought the Comiket set that came with a fan and a pencil board. Both items had illustrations that are not in the book. Actually, one side of the fan was in the “how to” section. A crop of the pencil board illustration is also in the book.

The first few pages of the book have new illustrations (6 in total) that Kantoku drew exclusively for the doujin. The illustrations feature Hatsune Miku, his mascot, Kurumi (also on the cover), K-ON‘s Yui and Azusa, Bakemonogatari, Cardcaptor Sakura, and Diebuster.

There is a small section where Kantoku outlines the steps in drawing this new art work.

The common theme for Kantoku’s home page illustrations was that most were from copyright anime and games. So, this ends up being a book of fan art. I love his take on characters like Hina Ichigo from Rozen Maiden, Amu from Shugo Chara, and the gang from Manabi Straight!

Most of the illustrations are three or four images per page. This still works out well, with high quality printing and A4-sized format on non-textured paper.

Nikki from Mirai Nikki is in there a few times, surprisingly. Haruhi from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, along with the Code Geass girls also appear in a few illustrations. Kantoku also includes his original character, Kurumi (the girl in the checkered skirt) in the mix of illustrations.

The page order is by when the illustrations first appeared on his home page. The art for the most recent series is towards the back. Kantoku even managed to include tributes to shows as recent as K-ON, and Toradora.