H2SO4 - Blonde Blossom Illustrations

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Since H2SO4 had a pretty good Comiket 77 release, I nearly convinced myself to pass on the Comiket 78 release, Blonde Blossom. But I’m so glad I didn’t! Blonde Blossom is an excellent collection, packed with some of H2SO4’s newest works along with prints of several of the hard to get promotional K-Books illustration cards.

The majority of this B5-sized, 40 page doujinshi (covers not included in that count) features full page, full color illustrations. And for once, H2SO4 has kept the monochrome to a minimum with only 8 pages in total. The cover illustration is new and is featured again inside as a spread. Though you can hardly see it, there is text embossed on the cover.

The first half of the book features some of the illustrations that have appeared in previous H2SO4 publications, like Girl’s Rhythm, but in smaller sizes. There are also a couple of illustrations from Toranoana goods, along with an original work H2SO4 did for an issue of Kikan S Magazine. The rabbit-eared girl Suee from DJ MAX Portable appears in this collection several times.

The best part of this book for me was the K-Books illustrations that were previously available only in playing-card size. Not only were the Tarot card illustrations included, but also the military uniform set ones which came out last summer.

The last part of the color section included several fan art contributions that H2SO4 had done for past fan doujinshi. Among them was the cover illustration done for The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya doujinshi fan book, and the illustration contributed to the Queen’s Blade Official Visual Fun Book Vol. 03. The illustration done for the 2010 Cuffs, Sphere, Cube Calendar was also in there. And though I seldom see Touhou from H2SO4, there were two illustrations in this collection.

The eight monochrome pages at the end mostly contained black and white line arts and gray scale illustrations. Only one page included sketches.

H2SO4’s most recent releases have really made the older doujinshi quite redundant. Unless you just like to collect, owning both Blonde Blossom and Island of Horizon Selection 2005 – 2007 would easily garner you an art book-like collection of H2SO4’s works.