Otomen, by Aya Kanno
2009, VIZ Media LLC

Otomen isn’t yaoi, but it does deal with some of my favorite themes, pretty boys and gender fuck. You can’t go wrong with that, right?

Yes, well, you obviously could. Not with this series, though. I’ve read the first two volumes (both out in 2009, with the third coming in August), and I find it charming and kind of clever. I love Aya Kanno’s art (I already wrote about her Blank Slate series) – something about her sharp noses and tired-looking eyes just sends me. And the pretty boys? Are pretty.

The gender fuck, then? I almost need a flow chart. The main character, Asuka, is a tall, cool, good-looking upperclassman who’s not just captain of the kendo team but the best in the country, as well as having a first-degree black belt in judo and a second-degree black belt in karate. His dark, painful secret is that inside, he’s Hello Kitty wearing a glittery tiara and a lavender unicorn t-shirt. He sews stupidly cute little animals and things. He knits scarves with bunnies on them. He creates outlandishly elaborate and adorable bentos for lunch every single day. And he lives for Love Chick, a shojo manga series. No one can know! It doesn’t matter that he can kick anyone’s ass (and often does). If people knew his shameful subtext, he’d be ruined! Ruined! (Note: There are spoilers ahead, but this part is all revealed in the first few pages.)

Asuka’s trauma is his parents’ fault, of course. His father left the family to become a woman, and his mother spent the rest of Asuka’s childhood trying to make sure her son wouldn’t follow in her ex’s mincing, high-heeled footsteps. To make his manipulative and borderline psychotic mother happy, Asuka must be utterly masculine, stoic, unromantic, and unexcited by stuffed pandas (and, for reasons that escape me, uninterested in sweets – by God, what a price to pay for filial devotion!).

Asuka has to hide who he is from everyone. He isn’t gay, mind you. In fact, that’s sort of his problem. He’s met a girl, Ryo, and fallen head over heels for her. And when you love someone – you make lacy crafts and fill your room with kawaii accessories! If you’re an ottomen, that is – a straight man who loves girly things and romance. (Wikipedia tells me Otomen is a multilingual pun, and that “otome” means “young lady.” “Men” means “men.”) (And by the way, if you need more pink and sparkle in your life, check out the official Web site for the series.)

Another main character, Juta, initially seems like he’s just going to play the experienced playboy sidekick part. He’s interested in Ryo, too. Or is he? Maybe he’s interested in Asuka? Turns out skirt-chaser Juta is secretly the famous shojo managa artist for Love Chick! Which he’s basing on Asuka and Ryo! Except he’s reversed them and made Asuka a girl in the managa, and Ryo a boy.

Ryo doesn’t get as much stage time as Asuka or Juta (at all), but she’s feisty and loyal and likeable, if somewhat lacking in explication as a character. She’s pretty, but – oh, you see it coming, don’t you? Kind of manly. She can’t sew or cook or make cute stuffed animals, and she isn’t interested. She’s also apparently clueless about relationships. Juta keeps trying to bring Asuka and Ryo closer (to advance the plot of his manga series), and it keeps not happening because of Asuka’s painful over-thinking of everything and Ryo’s complete obliviousness. The implication is that Ryo is like this because her mother died when she was young, and she was raised by her laughably manly father. She’s shown on the back of Volume 2 holding a cake she’s tried to make; it looks like a berry bush magically transmuted into the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and then melted in the afternoon sun.

(Spoilers ho!) There’s the setup. And wackiness ensues! Mild, soothing, cute wackiness. Kanno worries at the gender stereotypes like a mouthful of loose teeth, and Juta’s constant gaze feels palpable on Asuka’s skin. (All his manipulation is basically carried out through Asuka – I guess it would be creepy if he were stalking the girl.) In the second volume, Asuka gets entangled with a very girlie girl – who manipulates him and threatens to blackmail him and drugs him and kidnaps him. Ryo rides on a white horse to rescue him (literally).

So, let us recap briefly: Cute!!! I bought in because of the manga covers, which say it all, really. Otomen is an adorable exploration of pretty boys exploring their femininity. (In a perfectly safe, heterosexual context, of course. ) It’s sweet and fluffy, and the hero fights a bull. If you need more than that, you’re harder to please than I am.

Restart, by Shouko Hidaka
Digital Manga Publishing, 2008

“A drunken night of sex sparks the beginning of their relationship, but Tadeshi’s growing insecurity over the younger Aki’s meteoric rise to stardom gets in the way of love. Clearly, it’s not all glitz and glamour in the tumultuous world of modeling.” So sayeth the dust jacket.

I had a strange relationship with this book before I read it. I accidentally bought it twice (and Borders wouldn’t let me return the second copy, damn them to hell), and caught myself thinking about buying it four more times before I remembered. And that wouldn’t sound at all strange if you a) knew me and b) saw my four terrifying, teetering “to read” stacks. The point is, part of my brain clearly wanted to read this book.

It was right, of course. I’m confused about many things, but the kind of yaoi I like is not one of them. I’m torn here, by the way. Should I launch into a summary? Or tackle the cliché question? The former, I think.

The major point of Restart is willowy, elegant-looking boys with long, messy hair. Or at least long, messy bangs.
I always award bonus points if one of the main characters has that little quasi-updo thing going, too.
I would say that’s just me, but it can’t be. It has to be a bit of a fetish for other yaoi fans, too; it occurs too often not to be. Because Japanese men are more fashion-forward and groomed than American men, but really, the incidence of the little half-ponytail in the wild is not extensive.

The semi-random means of bringing the willowy, elegant-looking boys together is a misunderstanding that almost destroys their nascent relationship (let’s spin the wheel – oh, one of my favorites! They get drunk, have sex, one of them doesn’t remember it the next day, and they pine for each other until the mistake is cleared up), but finally resolves into a new connection, followed by meaningful makeup sex. There are longing looks across the room. There are resentful musings. There are hurt feelings and confusion. Followed by meaningful makeup sex.

The sex can occur on- or off-screen; surprisingly, I don’t much care which. It’s always tricky, approaching the initial sex scene in a book by a mangaka you haven’t read before. Everything can be fine up to that, but there are just a lot of deal-breakers – I can be in love, love, love with everything about the story, and then, oh, God, the sound effects say “slurp.” You know. And then there’s how the genitals are, er, handled. They can’t show them in Japan (although some mangakas do anyway, always a pleasant change of pace), so there are conventions to let you know what’s being put where. There’s the ghost penis, where one of the characters obviously has his or his partner’s equipment in hand, but the hand is empty. Or there’s the partially rematerialized penis – think Star Trek, where everybody is kind of a shimmery cloud before they fully beam in. As far as where the penis is inserted, you often get a kind of cut-away; fingers are inserted into – nothing. And sometimes you just have to laugh. Laughing is enjoyable and, I understand, can help you live longer, but it isn’t always right for the big sex scene. Restart gets it right. There are a couple of sex scenes (actual, not implied), but it’s all about the romaaaaaaaaaance. Charged expressions, well-positioned hands (not a given), meaningful eye contact. And it starts in the bathtub, which just pleases me.

TMI? Well, that’s the thing, when you’re talking about porn. Yaoi isn’t just about sex, but it is about sex. So while literary criticism is relevant, it isn’t really as relevant as whether it, you know, works. If it’s hot. That’s a combination of plot, story-telling, the quality of the art, and if it hits your favorite kinks – which can be the most important part. And that brings us back to cliché.

Those of you who are familiar with yaoi will recognize the getting drunk and having sex that is immediately followed by a misunderstand aspect of Restart whether you’ve read it or not. (I’m talking about the main story here, which comprises five chapters; there are two others, both enjoyable, but filler) It is not an original plot device. It is, in fact, a well-worn plot device – so much so that I actually think of it as a subgenre rather than a cliché. I don’t have a problem with that because the drawing is lovely, the story is sweet, and, most important, the romance works for me, and the sex works for me. That’s why I read yaoi; I want romantic porn. If the book succeeds on that level, it succeeds.

In the End, by Pink Psycho (Heath & Nheira)
English version published February 2008 by Tokyopop Inc.

Should we all take a moment to chuckle about titling a manporn sort of book In the End? We probably should, shouldn’t we? Let’s do that, just to get it over with. Ha, ha, ha!

OK. Now.

There’s a children’s book I like called The Important Book, by Margaret Wise Brown. It offers a series of facts about things, ending up with the fundamental truth, as it were. You know – my train is big. My train is fast. My train is filled with self-important Republicans from the suburbs, taking up two seats by spreading out their newspapers. But the important thing about my train is that it is late. No, not really. That’s a friend of mine – I live on the south side of Chicago, and Republicans are thin on the ground here. But you get the picture.

Is there a point to this? A manporn point? Well, yes, and thanks for asking. The important thing about this week’s manpornish manga, In the End, is Pink Psycho. Because the plot – oy, vey. Adolescent angst gone wild. The protagonist is so misunderstood, so miserable, woe is him, yadda, yadda. Well, look. I’m willing to cut it some plot slack, but you can either tolerate this kind of thing, or you can’t. High school angst entertains me, especially Goth-flavored. But it is what it is. Assuming that you are not in high school yourself, you probably need another reason to read the manga. Because we are not in deep yaoi water here – it’s not an “I didn’t notice there was no plot because I was distracted by the constant and inventive sex” situation. It’s more of a heavy yaoi-implied sort of thing. (Kissing and implied sex.)

Looking at this manga, you might assume it was Japanese – the layouts aren’t as polished and effortless as one expects, and ditto the art, but it basically has the right look. It’s certainly trying. In the End was produced for Tokyopop in Germany in 2006, though, and didn’t get to Japan until the following year, when it was released to cell phones. I may be betraying an embarrassing lack of sophistication here (if such a thing is possible in a column about manporn), but – released to cell phones? Anyway.

There is something about the book, though, and that something is Pink Psycho. If you’re like me, you saw the author was “Pink Psycho” and you were filled yea to the brim with a deep and abiding curiosity. I’ll share my own process. “Pink Psycho. I find that vaguely annoying. Who the hell is that? An Australian/Indonesian/European manga group everyone else knows about but me? Is it a band? A band that does manga? Did somebody leave cookies in the kitchen?” There’s sort of an explanation in the back of the book. I mean, it’s an explanation in the sense that a Lean Cuisine is a meal. It offers you something but mostly leaves you craving substance. Although they do tell us Nheira is pronounced “Nahy-Ruh.” Thanks, guys. Also that they drew the manga and are maybe in a band that might be called Nheira. “What the hell?” I asked. Is it a floor wax? A dessert topping?

So I did what one does when confronted with a question like this. A burning question. A question with many vowels. (I mean, really, Nheira. The name has a one-to-one vowel-to-consonant ratio.) I went to the Internet (after I ate a cookie). And while it pains me to boil down so bold and sweeping a story into so blunt a statement, Pink Psycho – Heath and Nheira – is – are – a fluke. A couple of German teenagers who got a manga published.

It’s an interesting story. Or compelling. Or something. I find Nheira kind of fascinating. He wants to be an artist, a mangaka, a visual kei performer (singer, songwriter, lyricist). He moved to Japan to further his career, apparently losing Heath along the way. (Heath filled in the story and pictures in the manga and played bass in a short-lived band – and somebody does need to play the bass.) Nheira is pretty. Which is a good thing, since he mostly draws himself. Pretty, Goth pictures of Nheira. I’m OK with that, too, in an amused sort of way. He’s young, y’all. And you want a beautiful boy to moon over? Oh, yeah.

Heath might be pretty too; I don’t know. I couldn’t find out a lot about Heath. For instance, did he name himself after the bass player for XJapan? I mean, he had to, right? But maybe it’s a coincidence. Anyway, it looks like he still works for Tokyopop in Germany. I wish him well. It’s like he’s my distant cousin or something. What’s he up to? I wonder. I sure hope that gay-ish cartooning thing worked out for him.

OK. Back to Nheira. (It’s OK. I think Heath’s heard that before.) Shyly glancing up through brutally thick lashes? Check. Double-pierced pout? Check check. Tiny, skinny little thing, dressed in those exciting and confusing visual kei Goth rags? Mm hmmmmmm. Jailbait? I think so, or not far from it. I don’t know how authentically distressed he is, though. A guess? Not as distressed as Kaito, his In the End doppelganger. Nheira comes across as kind of sweet-n-shy in his interviews. Did I actually watch online interviews with Nheira? In languages I don’t speak? Well, only two. And they were short. (Oh, shut up.) But as far as being an actual adolescent, I think he’s the real deal. Or within spitting distance. I’d actually kind of prefer spitting distance, since I like them legal, even for fantasizing (that isn’t a universal preference – cough cough, Harry Potter porn, cough cough), but there’s something – I don’t know, cute? – about a manga romanticizing adolescent pretty boy angst that’s written by an adolescent pretty boy, angsting.

On to the art. Nheira needed more time to draw In the End. Which is another way of saying he wasn’t able to make everybody the same size. There are some might pretty panels, but that is the level we’re working at. I liked some of the panels enough to want to buy the manga, but unless money’s no object, you should probably look before making a commitment. Here’s a fun project, though. Go to his
DeviantArt gallery. Go on. I’ll wait. You’ll see LOTS of photos, and you’ll notice that, as I think I may have mentioned, he’s pretty. (Also? You might want to check out his profile, where you’ll find out fascinating personal information, like that his personal quote is “rip it off.” I have no idea. Maybe it’s a koan? And that he likes milk. That actually creeps me out.) There’s some lovely art, too. This is beautiful. So is this. I cannot actually contain my love for those two drawings. Love, love, love. Did you get that? Love.

OK; now, that’s what I’m saying, right? Did you notice he basically draws himself all the time? Huh, I said. I don’t know what it says about his development. Or his marketing acumen, possibly. Because I like to look at him, and – well, check out at the comments on the DeviantArt site. Or his Web site. Or his MySpace page.

Anyway. I got a little acquisitive and wanted to buy his dramatically titled art book, Liberty, Raised Out of Dirt (I mean, oh, my God – it’s fun to say that in a War of the Worlds newscaster voice, though) but not $50 plus shipping from Japan on eBay worth, it turned out. I probably would, if there were more of that Edo-print-looking stuff. Which, by the way, makes sense of the samurai mouth motif on the cover of In the End, which I’d already noticed and liked, although it doesn’t follow through as a stylistic trope in the manga (which is maybe for the best, although I do like to imagine the whole book drawn that way – adolescent angst takes a whole new twist with samurai mouth).

I’m going to bring it back to Heath, in the end. (Get it?) He was banned from DeviantArt a few years ago. Oh, Heath. But his comments to Nheira remain. They don’t make a lot of sense after you run them through Babelfish (I didn’t! Oh, yes, I did), but they seem effusive. Also, they frequently end with little rows of hearts, which is just adorable. I will not spoil it by drawing any conclusions. I will leave you to draw your own.

Blank Slate, by Aya Kanno
published in English in October 2008 by Viz Media
There’s a second (and final) volume, which was published in December 2008.

Welcome to “Gluey Tart: Adventures in Manporn.” I’m writing this column because manporn is an extremely important subject. Well, not really. I’m writing this because I’m obsessed, and, more important, because someone asked me.

There are a lot of people reading manporn in the U.S. (I’m going to use the terms “manporn” and “yaoi” more or less interchangeably. I define “yaoi” loosely – and I mean that in every sense of the word – as romantic stories written by and for women about beautiful men having sex.) If you go to Borders and scan the shelves, you’ll see lots of titles from June, Blu, and Deux. There are others, but those three are pretty reliable. There are lots of other sources as well, but my point is, it’s easily accessible. Borders, people. Why does that matter? Well, there’s a lot of us. We’re not as crazy and marginal as we looked even five years ago. Maybe I’m just trying to have a self-esteem moment.

Or maybe we’re talking about a big market for a largely marginalized group in U.S. comics: women. I invite you to draw your own conclusions about how much that matters. I’m mostly going to talk about yaoi and shonen-ai manga that have caught my eye, and natter happily about them. (Quick note: people disagree about everything, including the meaning and proper usage of “yaoi” and “shonen ai.” I use “yaoi” to mean “there’s sex!” and “shonen-ai” to mean “no sex, but sigh, look at the meaningful eye contact!”)

Oh, about the pseudonym. I use it because it’s only polite. I write porn on the Internet, and while I am proud of this endeavor, I am not eager to have my employers, coworkers, acquaintances, and family members casually Google me and wind up reading something that has the word “cock” seven times in the first paragraph. Because is this something they want to know about me? It is not.

Which leads us (more or less) to the first review. I use this word almost carelessly, albeit with gusto. There are sites that do proper reviews of yaoi manga and novels. My favorite is “Boys Next Door,” where they make a proper attempt at summarizing the plot and that sort of thing. What am I going to write about, then? We’ll see. No sex in my first selection, because there isn’t any. Not even any of those longing looks, because there aren’t any of those, either. What we do have is pretty boy overload, and a certain unmistakable vibe.

The boy on the cover is pretty. So pretty. All the major characters are pretty. Cool, angsty-looking pretty boys with big guns. Did I mention that they’re pretty? They really are. I’m not sure who’s who all the time. I’m not always sure what’s happening. Don’t misunderstand – we’re not talking about confusion that rips space and time. We’re talking about a series of brow-furrowing, minor WTF moments that end with a quiet snort of “Oh, I don’t care anyway.” My willingness to accept this kind of thing is not infinite; far from it. I will put the book down and move on to the next shiny object, no matter how pretty the boys are. Blank Slate is well within my tolerances for not making sense. And, not to belabor the point, the boys are so pretty.

It isn’t just the pretty. I was going to say there isn’t enough pretty in the world to make up for some messes, but that might be a lie. In this case, though, the story is entertaining enough, in a thug-style James Bond meets the Matrix sort of way. The exceedingly pretty protagonist of Blank Slate, Zen (isn’t that deep?), is an amnesiac master assassin – and I don’t mind admitting that it makes me sigh happily just to write those words. I could summarize the plot, such as it is, but it doesn’t really matter. There are three casually related stories that you really wish were more closely related, but they aren’t. Zen is the constant – cool and almost supernaturally competent. The story is atmospheric and stylish. You’ve heard that before? You’ve heard everything in this manga before. It’s OK.

Zen. Is he bad? You know it. But deep down, underneath it all, does he have a heart of gold? Well, no, thank God. And is he hot? So, so hot. Hot, beautiful, mystery assassin boy. It works, despite being a big old cliché fest. The art is lovely, and the story is basically satisfying in a vague but solidly cool, noir sort of way. This book made me want to go out and buy a pair of spy sunglasses, and maybe one of those ’70s navy blue sniper trench coats. Possibly a t-shirt that says “Assassins do it from behind.” And I don’t know about you, but I call that satisfaction.

A couple of comments on my initial post about our new manporn column have expressed a certain amount of levity at the prospect. Obviously, manporn is somwhat funny in and of itself. I thought that I might explain a bit more briefly about why I want such a column on this site.

Basically, I think yaoi is pretty fascinating. It’s a genre that for the most part didn’t exist in the U.S., but which obviously has a large appeal. As such, I think it’s worth thinking about and talking about — especially since the critical reaction to it from most other corners of comicdom tends to be disbelief and ridicule.

So…Kinukitty is very funny, and I expect the column will be as well. But I don’t think yaoi is intrinsically any more ridiculous than super-heroes or alt comic autobio, or whatever. Yaoi is more unfamiliar, of course…which is the reason to have a column about it.

Update: Kinukitty’s first review of Blank Slate is now online.

Eagle-eyed blog watchers may have noticed that we have added a fifth hood to our utilitarians (or perhaps a fifth utilitarian to our hood? Yes, that probably sounds better.) What was I saying?

Right. We are very pleased to welcome the delightful and talented Kinukitty to our roster. Kinukitty will be writing a column entitled “Gluey Tart: Adventures in Manporn” focusing on yaoi, shonen-ai, and related pretty boy topics. The column will be (at least in theory) weekly, and should appear every Thursday (which is tomorrow.)

For those of you who must, must, must find out more about Kinukitty instantly, you can go to her livejournal wherein is archived her own personal manporn slash effusions. You can also hop over to the Gay Utopia and read her essay about why young girls need more manporn plus another piece of slashy goodness on the same site.

Kinukitty will have more to say on her own behalf tomorrow. Give her a nice welcome then, won’t you?