Soundgirl -Onkyou Shoujo-

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Soundgirl – Onkyou Shoujo- is a collection along the same vein as Digital Camera Girl, featuring product information alongside an illustration of a girl using the product. In all honesty, this book would have escaped my attention if it hadn’t been for the beautiful preview illustrations featuring Yoshizuki Kumichi’s art works.

Though Marukata is the cover artist, Yoshizuki Kumichi contributes three illustrations to Soundgirl – Onkyou Shoujo-, and all of them feature the sound equipment in creative and fantasy-filled environments. This is particularly important because sound systems don’t have a lot of mobility, so the standard approach is to just put a girl in a room with speakers, which is unfortunately what most of the other artists did.

Soundgirl – Onkyou Shoujo- is a B5-sized doujinshi that’s 56 pages when counting the covers. Illustrations are featured on every other page for the most part, tallying up to about 23 illustration plus the cover art. There are 10 artists participating in total, though one only drew a mascot character for the book. Aside from Marukata and Yoshizuki Kumichi, I wasn’t too fond of the other artists’ submissions. Ibukichi’s illustrations were easily the worst of the bunch, managing to be both unattractive and irrelevant to the featured sound equipment. I did enjoy the two colorful contributions by Ogataya Haruka, though.

Kamishiro Mai and Marukata both took a similar approach in their illustrations and had three apiece (though Marukata technically has four with the cover). Both artists had a “girl in her room” piece, but they also both did a more interesting “idol” style illustration, though neither included the sound equipment. Truthfully though, audio systems don’t exactly have the same kind of aesthetics as headphones, so it didn’t really matter whether they were included or not.

Otsuka Mahiro and Nonsugar also participated, with three works from Otsuka Mahiro, one equipment related illustration, and two pages of comics from Nonsugar. Character-wise, both artists looked pretty average compared with some of the other works in the book, but Otsuka Mahiro really put in a lot of detail towards the audio systems (above left).

Though I wouldn’t recommend Soundgirl – Onkyou Shoujo-, it’s cool that this idea spawned a commercial art book in the form of Soundgirl Duo, with a much more professional assortment of artists.