Fabularisia Minus Art Works 1999-2009

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Hiiro Yuki’s main release for Comiket 77 was Fabularisia Minus Art Works 1999-2009. It’s a full color, hardcover collection with ten years of illustrations. He also released a second, small doujinshi from his series, Snow Drawing Works. I’ll also cover it in this post, since it’s so short!

The first thing that came to mind when I saw Fabularisia was Ryo Ueda’s Tonbo Touhou Art Collection. The physical make of both books are identical, with a horizontal landscape layout for pages and hardcovers. Even the front end index page is the same, with a transparent paper layover that coordinates with the thumbnails underneath. I think it worked better with Ryo Ueda’s collection because so many images were originally stick posters. In this case, it just makes Hiiro Yuki’s illustrations look too small for the page they are on.

The art work groups are by publication. So the illustrations from Hiiro Yuki’s recent Head Glassphon G doujinshi art are all together. The same goes for his Snow Drawing Works series. It even includes some of the black and white sketch pages from the books in tiny thumbnail sizes. Release information is next to some illustrations, with the number of pages in the doujin. There is a lot of wasted space and redundant images, with many pictures that are too small to really appreciate.

The publication uses chronological order, so you can really see Hiiro Yuki’s style rewind further into the book. I love the art work in the first half of this 64-page book, but no so much the latter half. I don’t think the collection needed to be this complete.

Many of the art works in the back don’t really reflect the art we usually see from Hiiro Yuki. They’re less polished and weirdly proportioned in some cases. Ten years is a long time. I think an earlier cut off point to this collection would have really helped the content. Also, more focus on recent releases would have been equally good. This is one artist for whom I’m not a fan of his older art work. On a side note, I’ve seen the illustration of the girl with the scythe a million times, but I would have never guessed the artist is Hiiro Yuki!

Snow Drawing Works 2009

To put that all in perspective, above are the illustrations from Hiiro Yuki’s latest release, Snow Drawing Works 2009. This short, 16 page, B5-size doujinshi consists of 4 color pages with the rest monochrome sketches. There’s an Otogi-Jushi Akazukin x Sky Girls crossover manga that is 8 pages long. I like the work in this doujinshi, but I wouldn’t have bought it alone.

Usually, when an art collection dates back to 1999, the artist doesn’t include a lot of the work from 1999. Too bad that wasn’t the case for Fabularisia. I now know I’m more of a fan of Hiiro Yuki’s post Comiket 72 (Summer 2007) art work!