Rangiku Matsumoto NHML

The first Near Hentai Monthly Lady of 2025 is Rangiku from Bleach, a character I think a lot of people like. I don’t really remember much of her from when I watched/read Bleach, she always just kinda seemed like that show’s Tsunade. She also pairs well with Orihime, similar to Tsunade and Sakura, but I decided to pair her with Bleach’s protagonist Ichigo instead. Ichigo’s one of the few major shounen protagonists to not be in the studio yet, so I figured this could be his moment.

With this post, NHML nominations for the month of February are now open. For those who don’t know, I’ll run down the rules real quick. Nominations are limited to one per person. You can nominate any female character you want, provided I have not drawn her within the past calendar year (though I prefer characters I’ve never drawn, period). Previous NHML winners are not eligible for a second time. Nominees must also not be from the same franchise as this month’s winner, Bleach. If you violate any of those rules, I’ll let you know, and you can nominate someone else. I know it can be hard to keep track of these things. You may nominate by either commenting in the cBox, commenting on this post, or emailing me (Nearphotison2010@yahoo.com). I’ll compile a list of the nominees in the sidebar of this site, and then on February 1st I will use a randomizer to select the winning character who I will proceed to draw sometime that month. I look forward to seeing who you all nominate this time around!

Goku SSJ Magazine Pose

Last month I agreed to let a Lord Tier Subscriber upgrade their reward to a three-character pic for a little extra payment. At the time I knew that some of my other Subscribers at that tier who like to split their reward into two pics might see this as an invitation to get three one-character pics, but I don’t want to set that precedent as I think it’ll be a slippery slope from there. That being said, this month I had another Lord ask me about doing just that, but with their third pic only being an edit of one of their old commissions. I made an exception since it wouldn’t be a full new pic, but don’t expect to see something like this happen again.
What they wanted was the Goku Studio Life Magazine cover edited to be him as a Super Saiya-jin. Specifically, I was asked to make it feel like Goku how he appears in Space Emperor Slut, which included changing his expression along with the hair. A simple pic here, I know, but I hope some of you will like it.

2024 Year End Awards

Last year we began a new tradition, which is to have a sort-of “wrapped” final tally of some stats for our Studio performers. This year I’ve added a fan vote element, where several categories are decided by votes instead of statistics. Let’s go through the poll results first:











And now we get to the stat-based awards. Each category here is based on appearances from the year, using the SubscribeStar calendar (opposed to the public one).

First, we had no winner for the most One-Shot appearances this year so we’ll look at who the most Character Ask appearances in 2024:

Now, we’ll look at our Comeback Performers of 2024. This is the male and female performers who had the longest gaps between their returns this year and their last previous appearances:

Next is the Male Newcomer of 2024, the male performer who had the most appearances out of everyone who debuted this year:

And the equivalent Female Newcomer of 2024. This year, our Female Newcomer actually had the most appearances overall for the women, but since I do pics based on these categories it was decided to keep her in this spot:

And now, drumroll, our Male Performer of 2024. This is the male performer who had the most overall appearances this year:

And finally our Female Performer of 2024. She technically came in behind Kanamori, like I said before, but she had the most appearances of female performers who didn’t debut this year:

Aladdin (Magi) Character Ask 1

I drew this version of Aladdin once on commission a long time ago. Besides contributing to one of our NHS Fusions, though, I haven’t done anything with him since. I never really got into Magi, but I remember Aladdin being a fun protagonist and I like his design well enough. Of the candidates for a partner for this Ask, I thought Luffy paired relatively well with him.

Also, for those interested, here is the Q&A video I did for Subscribers last month: