Splendid Banquet - Taiwan Limited Illustrations

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Fancy Frontier is a comic convention much like Comic Market, except it’s in Taiwan. It attracts a lot of Japanese artists who do exclusive art work for the convention. Splendid Banquet – Taiwan Limited Illustrations is a great example of that. Aoi Nanase, Kisaragi Mizu, Tony Taka, Ramiya Ryo, REI, Amamiya Polan, Tokumi Yuiko, Mutsumi Sasaki, Noriyuki Matsumoto, and Carnelian have all done covers for Fancy Frontier Magazine. This art book collects those cover illustrations from 2005 through 2007.

Splendid Banquet is A4-size and 112 pages, with 96 in color. The rest is an index with content commentaries in Chinese from old issues of Fancy Frontier Magazine. The cover art work is by Aoi Nanase, and it’s gorgeous. Each illustration is a full page, with the next page mostly empty. All it includes is the artist’s name and a picture of the original publication it came from.

Splendid Banquet divides into fives sections, each with a different theme: Festival Day, Summer Time, Uniform Girl, Maid and Fantastic. The first section, Festival Day, features Tokumi Yuiko (x 2), Tony Taka, Ramiya Ryo, POP, Aoi Nanase (x 2), Kisaragi Mizu (x 2), Carnelian, and Amamiya Polan. There are a few with a Christmas theme, some with a Valentine’s Day, New Year’s, and Halloween theme.

“Summer Time” is a predictable category. Nearly everyone has on swimsuits except for Aoi Nanase’s cover girl, wearing a sundress and enjoying ice cream. Tony Taka is featured twice, with Aoi Nanase, Tokumi Yuiko, and Kisaragi Mizu each contributing one illustration. “Uniform Girl” refers to school uniforms and includes just four illustrations; one by Tony Taka, Noriyuki Matsumoto, Kisaragi Mizu, and Ramiya Ryo.

“Maid” is a little longer. It starts off with an illustration by Ramiya Ryo—whose art work really looks dated along side everyone else. Tony Taka illustrates two maids, with Tokumi Yuiko, Carnelian, Kisaragi Mizu and REI having one illustration each. Tony Taka’s illustrations are nearly all in the T2 Art Gallery, except for the maid illustration pictured above.

The final cover illustration section, Fantastic, focuses on fantasy characters with mermaids and girls with wings. Amamiya Polan has two illustrations, with Kisaragi Mizu, Mutsumi Sasaki, REI, and Akitaka Mika having one each.

The last color pages feature art by Taiwanese artists REI and VOfan. There were a few others artists included, but I wasn’t inspired to look them up.

Since the collection consists of cover illustrations, the quality is pretty consistent through out with so many talented artists participating. Ultimately, it does feel a little light with the illustrations on every other page.