‘Boxingman in Redroom’ by Kazuma Kaneko and Megumi Shiraishi, 2003. Scanned at 800 DPI, 8375x11951 (image above is compressed for Tumblr, check out the link. It won’t preview on Google Drive though, since it’s over 250mb).
This piece was drawn for the cover of Comickers Quarterly Spring 2003, which featured a segment on Kaneko’s art process and some of his new Nocturne stuff. I’ve scanned the cover and interview previously, found here, and you can find a translation from Dijeh here.
Boxingman in Redroom wasn’t drawn for a particular game or novel or anything, it’s an entirely original piece of art for the magazine (despite how much I might think the guy’s face looks like Eikichi, and the girl in the back looks like a Jiken character). Kaneko had been featured in Comickers twice before, from what I can find, in Autumn 2000 and Winter 2003 (and again in Winter 2005, I’ve scanned them all here. Even still, ATLUS owns the copyright to the piece (I clone-stamped this text below out in the final scan).
Anyway, ‘boxingman’ has a double meaning, firstly of the guy’s ‘desire to enter small places’, to be boxed in, and secondly because he’s wearing boxers. Maybe he was kidnapped or something, notice the lock of sorts around his neck, and he’s most notably the least red thing in the room. He looks pretty mischievous if that’s the case though, maybe he snuck in? In which case, I’m not sure why the lady in the back would be holding a razor blade. This is probably the kind of mystery Kaneko was trying to excite in the viewer. Not sure what the chameleon is adding to the story of the art, but he’s probably just chill like that. The stone mask could be a JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure reference, but that’s what everyone says about any stone mask in anything, so who knows.
The colours were annoying to work with, so depending on your screen, this might look completely different to how I see it. It scanned in far too orange, now the red still looks is a little too orange on my laptop screen, but on my monitor it looks a little too magenta and the guy looks too yellow. Looks in-between on my phone. You can try print this out for your wall or something if you’d like, but I’m not sure how the colours would come out. It’s meant to be a really nice, extremely dark red though, sort of like Gozu-tennoh’s face.
Anyway, enjoy besties, put it as your phone’s home-screen or something. I’ll try post more of my things on Tumblr.
Everywhere You Go, I Go
