Shungiku Nakamura
Blu
The art is completely weird. The story is a bit stock. The characters are dumb but sweet or arrogant and brilliant. The writing is strange, especially in later volumes. The sex is not that hot.
And yet this is one of my favorite comics of all time.
I often wonder, when I kick back and reread a volume, whether this was drawn in ball point in spiral notebooks or what. Because–well, look:
or:
Weird, eh? I mean, the perspective is completely batty. (Perspective, you might say, what perspective?)
And yet….
Look at this depiction of arrogance. It’s so clear, so vibrant.
I find it charming.
For me, the appeal of this comic is its utter shamelessness. I once read a how-to book about manga that said that Manga is love, and how true it is here. This is a book with a lot of emotion packed in around some fairly stock skeletons of plot and character. A young man (Misaki) is trying to get into college, but his exam scores suck, so he gets a tutor. Said tutor (Usami), a friend of his brother’s, is brilliant and wealthy and arrogant. They fall in love and have adventures. The end. (Well, not really the end, because it’s in 9 volumes and counting, but my point remains.)
The big twist of the series is that the older lover, Usami, is a famous author. He’s brilliant and writes award winning books. He’s also crazy as a fruitbat, in that special writer way, which means in his case, his bedroom is full of plush toys and trains and a dinosaur in a wee helmet. (Really!) He also, as a hobby, writes boys love novels, which he populates with his real-life crushes.
This allows the author to write some meta, sure, but it mostly allows her to indulge in a variety of hilarious and classic scenarios. Selections from Usami’s novels are written by various BL novelists and included, like so:
I’m not going to try to convince anyone to get over their distaste of the art to engage in the story. The art is one of those styles that is very much love it or leave it, I think. For me, I love it. What it lacks in realism, it makes up for in expressive charm. The story itself is fun, but nothing radical, at least in the first volume. The story starts with Misaki and Usami figuring out how to work together for the sake of Takahiro, Misaki’s brother and Usami’s unrequited love. It’s romance, pure and simple, with some smut and some humor. I won’t tell you differently. But sometimes, romance with smut and humor is exactly what’s wanted.
As a companion to Junjo Romantica, the volume contains another story, Junjo Egoist, which I liked in its first installments, but found disappointing as the run continued. Since Blu titles are usually shrinkwrapped, be forewarned that fully half of the volume’s pages are Junjo Egoist.
If you think THAT looks like it was drawn with ballpoint pen in a spiral notebook, you must not read outside of manga… that’s the height of refinement compared to some comics I’ve read.
*laughs* I often the art in American comics a trial, it’s true. Mostly I read manga.
The art’s a little exaggerated, and the best friend looks like the lover with straight bangs and glasses, but it displayed really well on my tiny mobile screen this morning: possibly because the overall black-white contrast and expressiveness of the lines is good. (IANAA: I am not an artist.)
I don’t agree that the characters are stock characters, either… I mean, just going on the three pages you have scanned in here. Are they stock BL types? I think the stock “dumb but sweet” main-character types in shonen and shoujo are, well, much dumber than the main character here. They tend to make simple, direct statements of intent: I will protect everyone! Masahiro-kun will be mine! I will conquer the world of competitive volleyball!
Whereas this main character tries to talk about “rich boy complexes” and “dyads of pandemonium” (although he is wildly off the mark and no doubt roundly mocked for it). My guess is that he is not dumb, but average, and it’s only because he’s hanging out with really smart people that he seems dumb by comparison.
(More speculation…) One thing you notice about shonen manga is that there is often a (or sometimes (a few) smart character, and that this character tends to be conflicted because he (more rarely she) can see multiple sides to an issue. And, consequently, he/she tends to be passive. Then the main character, who isn’t smart enough to fully weigh consequences, wins over the smart character by the force of the dumb character’s clarity of purpose, even though the smart character realizes that this clarity is only possible due to the dumb character’s simple-mindedness.
On the other hand, what you might have here is… I haven’t read the manga, but… knowing that the lover is brilliant, the best friend is also smart, and the older brother was a friend to the brilliant character so he might have been smart too… what you might have here, is a situation in which most of the cast is brilliant, and only one character is “dumb” (read: average). And in this situation, it’s not the smart characters who fold themselves down to accommodate the dumb character, but the dumb character who is reaching into uncertain intellectual territory to interact with the smart characters. Which would be a somewhat unusual plot construction, I think.
Am I totally off?
I also think it’s telling that the dumb character uses difficult vocabulary (badly) while the brilliant character speaks in simple direct sentences (Because I want to) and has a room full of stuffed animals. To me this indicates that the author is really, really smart.
Finally, I want to point out that the first page is hilarious:
You lived life without ever finding true understanding, and hence you strayed from the right path, but found nothing but more loneliness. And on top of that, you own a red sports car and a longhaired dog named Alexander!
And your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries!
Well, wacky rich boys/men who have only the most tenuous–if any–grasp on what most people consider everyday reality are fairly standard figures in what might be called the “Cinderella in the land of wealthy nutjobs” subset of shoujo and BL manga. (For example, the shoujo titles “Ouran High School Host Club,” “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” and “S.A.” Although the rich classmate who’s most conspicuously clueless about real life in “S.A.” is actually female–the boys in the middle class heroine’s class in that series seem relatively down to earth by comparison.) Most of the male characters in “Ouran High School Host Club” fit this character type to some extent, especially club president Tamaki, who shares Usami’s fascination with “normal” middle class life. And pervily eccentric writers–usually acclaimed and/or best-selling–actually show up surprisingly often in those genres–e.g., the uncle figure the heroine and the two boy cousins live with in the ultra-popular shoujo title “Fruits Basket” and Eiri Yuki, the seme in the off-the-wall BL screwball comedy “Gravitation.” So that might be what she means by a stock type. But I agree with you that Misaki in “Junjo Romantica” isn’t particularly dumb, except by comparison with the brilliant, elite characters he winds up hanging out with once he gets pulled into his older lover Usami’s world.
Yeah, Margaret is right. BL is chock-a-block full of these two character types. Another classic is Our Kingdom, which has a merchant prince and a commoner. I’m terrible at remembering names of the shorter stories like that (they tend to run together), but it’s pretty common.
Some of the Misaki is dumb comes from the shorts at the end, where you get to read his really bad school book report, or his attempt at haiku, or what have you. I always like them.
Personally, I think Misaki is emotionally brilliant but intellectually slower, and Usami is emotionally stupid and intellectually brilliant, so they balance out. It’s one of the things I enjoy so much about the series, that Misaki really holds his own with Usami at times. I think that Misaki’s non-intellectual nature allows his other strengths to be, I’m not sure how to put this… Valued? Highlighted?
Anyway. One of my very favorites.
Ah, I see.
There’s also an eccentric author-uncle in “I Want to Become Your Bird” – he writes porn – everything else in that story is a clichéd mess, so makes sense that that is, too.
It’s funny you mention Gravitation, because Shinichi really is dumb, in the shounen way.
Seems like a good series. Thanks for the write-up!