MELINDA: Hello, Utilitarians. I’m Melinda Beasi.
MICHELLE: And I’m Michelle Smith.
MELINDA: About a month ago, Noah asked if we’d be interested in having a conversation about comics here at The Hooded Utilitarian, similar to our weekly manga discussion column, Off the Shelf (at Manga Bookshelf), and our monthly art-talk feature, Let’s Get Visual (at Soliloquy in Blue). He suggested at the time that we might try discussing a mutually admired series (as we once did with Ai Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss), and that the subject need not be manga.
With those thoughts in mind, we decided to take a stab at One Thousand and One Nights, a South Korean boys’ love series written by Jeon JinSeok and illustrated by Han SeungHee, published in English by Ice Kunion/Yen Press. While this may seem like an unusual choice for this audience, there are a couple of things that make this series especially interesting to us.
First, though the story has a BL romance at its core, it is a multi-volume epic (11 volumes in total) featuring a series of interwoven stories-within-the-story drawn from multiple periods and cultural settings. Secondly, it’s a BL romance written by a man, unusual in a genre mainly written by (and for) women.
