Stumbling upon a pinnacle

[elfs]

Have you ever picked up a book, portfolio, comic book, or CD by an artist or performer you didn't know, made you way through the work, and at the end thought to yourself that what you just read was so fresh, so new, so wonderful that you just had to get more of it? And when you did, you were disappointed to learn that what you'd found was either anomalous or the high point of his creative output, and everything that came before that was rough-edged and unready, and everything after was an attempt to recapture that high point?

I had that happen this weekend. A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon Onikubo Hirohisa's manga, Preference for Pleasure (more of that stuff you'll never read in English, sad to say) and his pencils were lush, beautiful, sweetly feminine in a way, and his stories were cute, touching, complex and humane. So I said to myself, "I should get more of this."

After stumbling around the Internet on and off looking for it, I finally found some this weekend and downloaded it. And I had that awful, sinking feeling. The lush pencils were still there, but they were often muddied with really crappy zip-o-tone, or completely unnecessary color (probably commercially more viable). Even when they weren't, the printing was terrible. But worst of all, the themes of the rest of his work is all mean, vicious stuff. Lots of interpersonal violence, lots of unhappy endings, lots of abuse of one gender by another (at least he's relatively even-handed about it in his stories, even if his cover art is mostly unhappy women), the worst of what we've come to expect of hentai without dropping into total guro.

I hate when that happens.