One of the most original and artistically accomplished, not to mention prolific, mangaka whose work I am familiar with is 唯 登詩樹 / Yui Toshiki; his work manages exceptional originality, both in terms of /d/ worthiness, as well as in terms of outright surrealness or artistic novelty. Not only this, but a large proportion of his works are produced in sumptuous colour…
Yui Toshiki really covers a broad variety of manga and artistic formats. He has a number of artbooks (notably the Yui Shop series), a wide variety of conventional manga ranging from almost non-H (Boku no Tsubasa) through to H (Mai’s Room), all the way up to fully adult manga. And there are a lot of them: I must confess to not even having seen half of them, and he seems to be maintaining this impressive output with a horde of assistants. It is nice to see such a rounded career as a mangaka.
Personally I favour the short, more art-centric, pieces he does, but the conventional manga are also very good. His earlier works are also good, and do not seem to have become dated too much, as can sometimes happen to an almost painful extent over a long career.
Here, I’m reproducing some of his short colour sections from 桃姫/Momohime magazine, where he has been regularly published for many years now. His most recent works are clearly recognisable as such from the extremely high quality of the CG – it is very gratifying to see this kind of work outside the context of eroge.
As you can see from these examples, he has really embraced CG techniques to fantastic effect; I suppose having all those assistants enables such an impressive colour output in terms of both quality and quantity.
Whilst a lot of these titles are easily available, either in print or elsewhere, and even in English editions, the sheer number and time span involved means that acquiring them all is likely to be difficult – still, it might be very well be worth the effort. Starting with the Yui Shop series is probably advisable. Digging online should also reveal some scanlated editions, and for some reason there are also a variety of Chinese editions of his works available.
Reading some of these articles you may get the (correct) impression that I have a great deal of respect for originality in manga, whether artistic or in terms of content, and if both are combined I am especially enthused – this is clearly the case here. In Yui Toshiki we find highly original themes coupled with highly original art, which also happens to be accomplished with ever increasing technical excellence, leading to a sublime final product which is sure to be of interest.
