On The Otaku’s Study, I regularly talk about design compendiums when it comes to artbooks. There are books which provide insight into the processes of creating characters and settings for a video game, manga or anime. However, there are many artbooks out there which focus on just the splendid work by an artist – with their value coming from how much you like that person’s work. With the subjective nature of their appeal, these are books better previewed than reviewed, in my opinion. But, I would like to share my thoughts on one of the most recent books added to my collection – Nostalgic Boy: The Art of NOEYEBROW.
A curse of growing up and maturing is that, as reality hits home about the meaning of life, we struggle to maintain the same intuitive sense of wonder and exploration we have as children. For myself, my once starry-eyed persona has been clouded over the years with a more analytical mindset, with ideas driven by the best available data and what works with an audience. This is not to say that my approach is terrible by any degree, and serves me well working in Journalism, Marketing and Communications. Yet, it is hard not to be nostalgic about the simpler days… the days where my mates and I would make-believe adventures and experience the world through the randomness, we made up daily.
True to its title, Nostalgic Boy: The Art of NOEYEBROW features 128-pages of artwork from the artist of the same name on Japanese social network platform PIXIV, which depicts the typical lives of Japanese boys across the seasons, locations and in different imaginative scenarios. From a forest in summer going bug hunting with friends, to many sessions of make-believe, to trying to look serious while on a couch with cats – there is a lot of variety in this book, all of stellar quality.
Much of the book is dedicated to full-page artwork, which features both well-designed characters and environment backdrops which can only be described as picturesque. NOEYEBROW’s attention to detail is brilliant, with each piece looking even better than real life, and managing to suit the tone of the scene perfectly. My favourite work in the book is on the creepier side, set in a Gothic environment as the characters wear harrowing Pierrot and plague-beak masks. If you are not entirely sold on the artwork previewed in this article alone, I highly recommend checking some of their posted art HERE.
There are a few ways the full-page artwork is broken up. On several occasions, you are given full-body portrait artwork of the characters featured in each of the chapters. Although the descriptive text is in Japanese, those with minimal knowledge of hiragana will be able to make out the names, while the descriptive text is translatable via apps on modern phones. To me, given the book is titled ‘Nostalgia Boy’, it makes sense learning a bit about the featured characters.
I also loved that some of the full-sized artwork was repeated on a second page, but this time focusing in on some of the smaller details that you would likely have missed on the first view. It served to show just how much attention to detail was put into many of these pieces.
Nostalgic Boy: The Art of NOEYEBROW is a reasonably priced artbook, only costing 1,800 yen or your regional equivalent based on where you buy it. I purchased my copy during a trip to Kinokuniya Sydney last year, where it was prominently displayed among the English-language manga and priced in the high $ 30’s. That said, the sacrifice with such an affordable book is that it while the print quality is brilliant, the book itself is smaller than most. Coming in at 148mm × 210mm in size, it is about the size of a manga volume. However, I will complement the decision to make the book landscape-oriented, which mitigated the issue many books have of having too much white space.
Again, the issue with artbooks of this type is that their appeal is very subjective, based on your personal tastes in style. That said, I loved practically every element of Nostalgic Boy: The Art of NOEYEBROW, and if you are after a 100% safe-for-work shounen artbook which offers cute, high-quality art that does en-still a sense of nostalgia of your childhood… this is one I could recommend picking up if you get the chance.
