Manhattan Love Story, by Momoko Tenzen
March 2009, Digital Manga Publishing

God of Dogs, by Satoru Ishihara
September 2008, Digital Manga Publishing

Romantic Illusions, by Reiichi Hiiro
September 2008, Digital Manga Publishing

Love Knot, by Hiroko Ishimaru
February 2009, Digital Manga Publishing

I don’t necessarily want to write about manga I dislike. This isn’t my naturally sunny disposition rearing its ugly head; I just don’t want to spend any more time with it than necessary. I read it, I failed to enjoy it, and the last thing I want to do is think about it for another thirty minutes. I’ve been on an unlucky streak, though, and decided I should share the pain – I mean, discuss what makes these yaoi titles the varying shades of bad that they are.

That reminds me of one of my favorite Edgar Allen Poe stories, “Berenice”:

“Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch – as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? – from the covenant of peace, a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of today, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.“

So true, yes? “Berenice” kicks ass, by the way, because the protagonist (whose name is Egaeus, for heaven’s sake) disinters his lost love to remove her teeth. She might not have been dead when she was buried, either, but of course that’s a given.

I am obviously not holding any of these poor books up to the standard of “Berenice,” because in that context, most things come off pretty badly. The thing is, every time I pick up a yaoi manga, I’m hoping to fall in love. I’m hoping something will work for me and leave me with a happy, stupid-looking smile on my face. And I’m really pretty easy, too. I’m usually happy enough if the art is pretty, even if the story isn’t great. Conversely, if the story is nice, but the art isn’t ideal, that’s still OK. And even if the art and the story are both a bust, sometimes the mangaka will hit one of my kinks, and that’s enough for me, too. So a title really needs to succeed on only one of three levels for me to feel like I got something out of it.

Sadly, despite my low standards, I am still disappointed more often than not. Manhattan Love Story, for instance, just pissed me off. I’ve read worse, but that’s the only positive thing I’m prepared to say about it. Well, that, and I like the cover design. That’s what suckered me into this mess in the first place. Too bad I ordered in from Amazon and couldn’t turn it over to see the illustration on the back.

That would have sobered me right up. I intensely dislike gay stories in which one of the pretty boys looks and acts like a girl. The whole point of reading romance stories about men is that they’re about men. In the first story, the main character, Diamond, is having a discreet affair with his boss, Rock. I kid you not. Diamond and Rock. That could probably be funny, under other circumstances, but trust me when I tell you that these are not them. Diamond is a tiny, timid, uncertain little florist with ridiculous amounts of hair. Rock is a hugely successful captain of industry who appears regularly in magazines and, for reasons that are unclear to me, his important business ventures include the little flower shop where Diamond works. I could overlook all of this, I think, if a) there were anything to the story, and b) if Diamond didn’t look and act like a big bundle of annoying feminine stereotypes. He’s flushed, he’s flustered, he has some bizarre physical condition that causes him to become very ill if he works too hard. To which I roll my eyes and mutter profanity. Perhaps his condition is caused by the strain of growing all that hair.

There are a couple of other stories in this book, and poofy-haired, overly feminine uke syndrome does turn up again. (Uke = bottom; in yaoi, the bottom is often drawn smaller than the top, or seme.) In one particularly creepy instance, the syndrome manifests in the form of an angelic little cherub, who is named Raphael, for Christ’s sake, and also has too much hair and is drawn to look about 7 but is said to be 13 or so (I don’t remember, and I refuse to look it up).

Raphael sees his teacher having sex with one of his fellow students, and later, the teacher confesses his love for Raphael. To clarify, this is presented as cause for celebration rather than a call to the Department of Children and Family Services. This kind of thing is not unheard of in yaoi, but it’s a couple of bridges too far for me. There are other problems, too, but I’ve had enough. No mas. Let us never speak of this manga again.

God of Dogs is a disaster, but not a fluffy, weepy, eighth-grade-idea-of-romance disaster. A completely different kind of cock-up, as it were. I blame the cover for this one, too, but not just the cover. The description, which promised brutal Chinese mafia action and a mysterious stranger, pushed some buttons for me. Nice art, favored kink – as the big man said, two out of three? Ain’t bad. I thought I couldn’t loose.

The art is in fact pretty good. That isn’t always a given – the cover art is not necessarily representative of what’s inside the book. In this case, there’s no subtlety to the lines, and the faces look overly Neanderthal (I realize they’re supposed to be gangsters, but geez). But overall, it’s fine. I can appreciate the aesthetic beauty of the pretty boys, tough as they are. And as a bonus, there’s a body dissolving in lye or something in a bathtub, which is always a pleasant surprise.

You’re sensing a “but” in here somewhere, aren’t you? To paraphrase a personal hero of mine, “Everybody I know has a big but. What’s yours?” (That’s from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. It’s a classic.) Well, yes. The manga looks pretty good, and it’s about gangsters, BUT it doesn’t make any damned sense. There is sort of a plot, and yes, you can pick out some of the salient points thereof, but my brow was furrowed in the WTF position pretty much the whole time I read this book. Maybe I was trying to think too much about the details, but God of Dogs felt like a three-hour movie cut down to 90 minutes, and like maybe they went too deep and excised a certain amount of connective tissue along with extraneous dog reaction shots.

The back cover says:

“The notoriously vicious Chinese Mafia has lost its next rightful heir… to sudden suicide! Now, the esteemed “God of Dogs” Tsai family must race against the ticking clock and hunt down the child of the deceased eldest son in order to preserve their ancient, sacred legacy. Meanwhile, the mysterious Archer has been convicted of killing his father and is on his way to jail. What will fate reveal for the powerful Tsai clan’s criminal dynasty AND this strange young man?”

Your guess is as good as mine.

Next! Romantic Illusions is a cheerful screwball comedy-ish title that explores the humorous and, yes, romantic possibilities inherent in multiple personality disorder. How could you go wrong with that? Right? Yu, the main personality, is a mild-mannered florist. (There were florists in the first book, too. What’s the deal with all the florists?) His other two personalities are a rockin’ tattooed playboy and a brilliant young lawyer (who has brown hair, when the other two are blond, which is a pretty impressive trick, when you think about it). (The less dominant personality is drawn shorter in some panels, as well, which I also found disconcerting.) Yu created the other two personalities so someone would love him, and yes, Hiiro does, er, touch on the possibilities for, um, physical humor inherent in this situation. Not very well, but at least she reaches for it. (Ahem.)

Ultimately, each of the personalities ends up with a boyfriend of his own, one of them another person with multiple personality disorder. That should be pretty good – funny, sweet, kinky, perhaps slightly disturbing, but potentially in a good way – but it isn’t. It just kind of falls short. How is that even possible? I don’t know.

Which leads us nicely into Love Knot, which is made of meh. The art doesn’t thrill me, but it isn’t bad enough to actively annoy me, either. The story sounded like a good bet – Keigo, a detective by day/assassin by night (and I do love me an undercover assassin), takes in overly effeminate, on-the-run psychic Emiya and discovers that Emiya had been held against his will as part of a secret government project. Keigo falls in love with Emiya and vows to protect him always. Complications ensue, but they wind up in a happily-ever-after situation that includes Keigo discovering that Emiya’s long-lost mother is dead, yes, but always loved him. Aw.

There’s a little bit of heat between Keigo and Emiya, so I was moderately happy with that. And there’s a hint of darkness due to the assassin and repressive secret government project angles, but it isn’t played out, so no payoff there. I put the book down and said, “Well. That was deeply mediocre.” In retrospect, it was probably sub-mediocre.

I blame myself, really. It’s not like I didn’t have adequate warning. Upon reflection, I remember that Momoko Tenzen also wrote Paradise on the Hill. Oh, yeah. I didn’t like that, either. Satoru Ishihara wrote Dost Thou Know? and Hiroko Ishimaru wrote Total Surrender. Nope, didn’t like those, either. Too bad I can’t reliably access my vast database of disappointing manga. It all blurs together. (I wasn’t familiar with Reiichi Hiiro, so I’m giving myself a pass on that one.) I have to admit that I’m a bit worried about what I’m going to read next. Because this has just been disheartening. Still and all, you have to get right back up on the horse that threw you, right? Take the huge, towering stack of unread manga by the horns and all that. Or maybe I should reread a classic, just to restore my faith in manporn.

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.