As many regular readers of the blog know, I’m a big fan of KIO Shimoku’s manga, Genshiken.  When he started the manga back up with a whole batch of new characters, I have continued to blog it and though it isn’t quite the same as the original, I still like it.

That said, I don’t tend to keep tabs on everything a manga-ka does.  I just have too much going on to keep that close a watch on the comings and goings of manga created by a manga-ka of a favorite series of mine. So, what usually happens is that people end up bringing things to my attention for me to check out.  Such is the case with Kio-sensei’s manga, Spotted Flower, which came out in 2009 and which appears to be a tri-anual publication.

The premise of the manga is that an unnamed otaku with a job has married a normal girl and gotten her pregnant.  Her husband is the second otaku guy she was ever with, thus her first experience trained her on how to deal with her husband.  Now that her pregnancy is in a stage where it is OK for the couple to have sex again, he doesn’t want to because of his child growing in her womb. So, though she is very understanding of his otaku desires for hentai doujinshi (even buying him ten such doujinshi for Christmas), she wants him.  She engages in three different attempts to seduce him in the first three chapters, apparently having cosplayed for him (or her prior boyfriend) as foreplay prior to her pregnancy.  Yet, when she finds out that striped panties (shimipan) gets his motor running enough to override his distaste at the idea of having sex with his wife while she’s pregnant, she gets angry.

This manga side-project of Kio-sensei’s reminds me of Fujishima-sensei’s (Ah! My Goddess) own side project Paradise Residence. Both have a small number of pages per chapter (seven to nine for Spotted Flower) and are only released every three-plus months or so and I guess fill out the corners of their time when they are not working on their normal monthly series.

Fans of Genshiken will see Spotted Flower as Kio-sensei’s way to have characters Madarame (the chief otaku in Genshiken) and Saki (the only normal girl in Genshiken, who is still dating her attractive, otaku boyfriend Kousaka) as a married couple and what their life might be like.  Certainly, there are plenty of reasons to think this beyond the fact that the male in Spotted Flower is an otaku and the female is normal. The otaku male wears glasses like Madarame did and has a job like Madarame does. The normal wife has apparently cosplayed the same President character from the made up anime Kujibiki Unbalanced that Saki got forced into cosplaying.  In addition, she did some other cosplay, which Saki was also forced to do as part of her promise to Ohno upon graduating college. Finally, in the most current, fourth chapter, the wife’s grandmother is revealed to have named the wife, something Saki’s grandmother did.  As such, it seems many Genshiken fans just treat this as Madarame and Saki even though they look different.

In reality, the otaku husband is a combination of Madarame and Sasahara from Genshiken while the wife is a combination of Saki with a bit of Ogiue thrown in for good measure.

Because the pregnant wife attempts to seduce her husband in the first three chapters (not counting “chapter 0”), the manga has a much stronger ecchi feeling than Genshiken ever did. Granted, Genshiken had all kinds of talk about hentai anime, hentai doujinshi, hentai manga, and hentai games, as well as the “activities” done with those products, there usually wasn’t an erotic feel to the manga, even in the chapter where Saki is shown showering (though steamed up a great deal).  For the otaku (or others) with a pregnant fetish, well, this seems to be targeting that audience.

So, fans of Genshiken will probably enjoy Spotted Flower as they imagine the characters to be Madarame and Saki.  Manga readers not familiar with Genshiken will have no problems reading this manga since they will simply enjoy it for the aspects of an otaku male getting to marry a very attractive, normal female and seeing their life as they expect their first child.

Update 29-MAR-2014: I’ve discovered a lot of you are looking for chapter 10 of Spotted Flower, which I understand was released in Japan some time back, but neither raw chapters nor a translated one has appeared anywhere that I’m aware of. I wish I did ’cause I’d like to see what happens next.

Update 1-JUN-2014: I’ve got my review of chapter 10 written.