Kishida Mel's Lumen & Pistil

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I was looking back on things from Comiket 77 that I missed, and Kishida Mel’s short but sweet Pistil was overlooked! To remedy this, I figured I could combine that and his Comiket 78 release, Lumen, in the same review especially since they’re both similar overall.

Pistil

With both books out in front of me, the summer and winter contrast in the illustrations is a lot more obvious. Pistil had the winter theme, with many of the girls portrayed in winter clothing and less vibrant colors, and sometimes outdoor snow sceneries.

Pistil is 16 pages and A4-sized, printed on a heavy card-stock paper all the way through, so that the covers feel as thick as the pages. Even though it’s 16 pages, it feels a lot more like 12 because the inside covers along with the first and last pages are just solid colors pages without any illustrations. While increasingly more artists make use of all the pages in their doujinshi, Kishida Mel has not joined that bandwagon. So including the cover, there are ten illustrations in the book, with one of them being a spread.

And unfortunately, that two-page spread doesn’t even line up properly in this staple-bound volume! But it is a rather unique illustration from Kishida Mel, depicting a cyborg girl, which is a far cry from the every day scenes he usually portrays.

Lumen

That being said, the summer theme this time is just gorgeous, with beautiful lighting and detailed sceneries to compliment the girls. While the more detailed backgrounds in Pistil were indoor scenes, this time everyone’s outside.

In Lumen, Kishida Mel includes a few illustrations done with his distinctly video game style, with girls reminiscent of the designs from Atelier Rorona & Totori. None of the poster illustrations from the Dengeki Daioh GENESIS magazines were included. There were also no spreads in this volume, so including the cover, there are 11 illustrations.

Both Lumen and Pistil were briefly sold through Toranoana, but for the most part if you wanted to get them now you would have to use Yahoo! Japan Auctions. I think they’re worth it, but only if you can get them cheap. The both of these together would have made for one decent length doujinshi.