Some Shonen-Ai/Yaoi/Yuri Quick Reviews

here are some quick reviews of the various yuri/yaoi/shonen-ai titles i have read recently. i specifically noted how the art is, and if there is a rape scene, because i tend to judge titles with rape scenes very harshly.


art of loving by eiki eiki, pub. shinshokan 2001/digital manga 2006
art: nice
rape scene: no
general comments: i enjoyed this title for its breaking of the mold most yaoi is made from. the story is somewhat dark and a little less mindless than most writing for yaoi. no negative judgment is applied to homosexuality.
rating: positive

gravitation by maki murakami, pub. gentosha comics 1996/tokyopop 2003
art: rough
rape scene: sort of
general comments: i thought this series started off very sincerely. the characters were interesting and likeable. however, i was put off by the painful first sexual encounter, and the weird hedging around calling oneself gay just because one HAPPENS to be in love with/sexually attracted to someone of the same sex.
rating: positive (with a note: the series becomes increasingly chaotic and nonsensical after about book 5)

loveless by yun kouga, pub. 2002
art: okay
rape scene: no
general comments: i found this title very dopey, with an icky man-boy edge. the combat scenes were unoriginal and the characters uninteresting.
rating: negative

legal drug by CLAMP, pub. 2001
art: okay
rape scene: no
general comments: i found something very lazy about the set-up and character development in this series. plus one of the characters looks and acts just like a character from xxxHolic, and there's even a cross-over episode to re-enforce that. all the main characters are gay (or obviously soon to find out they're gay) men, and no negative judgment on homos is passed out. i liked the psychic angle, although i'll say once again that i thought it was lazily sketched out. for some reason, i'd probably get the next book if it was out, though.
rating: positive

selfish love by naduki koujima, pub. 2001
art: okay
rape scene: sort of
general comments: i found a lot of problems with this title. it's kind of a shallow "boys in school" story, that feels like a high school story but is supposed to be in college. there's a stupid, repeating motif of the "seme" making aggressive advances, the "uke" fighting desperately to get away, and then later the uke thinks about how he really loves the seme and so technically it's all okay the he's being an aggressive, rape-y asshole. pretty standard yaoi stuff, and the characters are kind of flat and boring.
rating: negative

gerard & jaques by fumi yoshinaga, pub. 2000
art: okay
rape scene: yes
general comments: i had a feeling i wouldn't like this book, because the front cover depicts an older man manhandling a younger boy who looks angry and frustrated. unsurprisingly, in their first scene together, the older man (gerard) basically sexually assaults the younger boy (jacques), while insulting him for not being a good enough whore. the story actually gets better in some ways when it gets into the gerard's history, but then it starts adding on some misogyny, which then takes away from the story again. worst of all, jacques falls in love with his former rapist.
rating: negative

shout out loud by satosumi takaguchi, pub. 1996
art: nice
rape scene: not quite
general comments: i liked this series enough that instead of waiting for the fifth volume to finally come out in english, i bought it in japanese and struggled through it with a dictionary in one hand. i liked the natural, expressive art, and the departure from most depictions of male-on-male love, whether they be shonen-ai or yaoi. the characters aren't paired up in a weird older/younger thing, they're pretty well-defined, and the story is set in an interesting world combining voice-acting and professional hockey (somehow). i liked that there was no pronounced misogyny, and there's even an interesting older single woman (she's evil, but in a likeable way). there's was some annoying hedging around being gay by many of the characters, and the sexual aggression of one character and constant crying of another got to me. however, all in all, i found it enjoyable.
rating: positive

works by eriko tadeno, pub. 1998
art: okay
rape scene:no
general comments: i actually am not sure i've ever read a yuri title before this one, so i don't have anything else to compare it to in the same category. the stories in this volume were fairly short, so they didn't get into a lot. some of them were a little more naive about lesbian life, but i felt most of them were fairly believable (the artist is a lesbian herself). the sex scenes weren't the hottest ever, but they were pretty good. i felt all the women involved in the stories were interesting and well-characterized.
rating: positive

Don't Respect the Authority

i just finished reading several collections ("human on the inside," & "fractured worlds") of "the authority," which i only picked up because, of course, there are hummasexuals involved. i'm often displeased with this kind of "straight" (so to speak) tradition of superhero comicing, and i didn't find "the authority" to be different. the plotlines are sloppy and chaotic, and i even felt confused about what the individual characters' superpowers were. the art suffers terribly from a lack of knowledge of human anatomy at times.

then, there was the misogyny. look, putting in two gay men doesn't excuse you from blatantly hating on women. when the word "pussy" is used as an insult 50,000 times, including by a group of dead sages who speak with "the doctor," it's a good sign that the writer has a problem with misogyny. and to back up that feeling, there were needless physical punishments for female characters that had been written to be "evil" or just kinda annoying. "the doctor" gives his wife a giant, deformed ass in punishment for being a selfish bitch, for example. a black female badgirl (whose superpower was basically nuclear gospel singing--um, racist) gets killed by having metal bar rammed down her throat, and this is after her body keeps morphing grotesquely back and forth between average-sized, small-torso-balloon-thighs, and grossly overweight. don't know if that size-changing was supposed to be part of her superpowers, or if the artist just got really into hating her character.

oh, and the gay men involved in the story, apollo and midnighter. out of these two volumes, there is no sex, no kissing, and hardly any touching. i'm sure they managed to get to that in later volumes, after the author and artist spent months preparing for the "ick" of depicting physical love between two men. i mean, seriously, we see just about every other character in a naked, sexual situation, but these two just don't seem to get around to it. lame.

also, terrible costumes. all around. just my opinion.

Friends of Lulu's "Girl's Guide"

i purchased friends of lulu's "girl's guide to guy's stuff" off the internet tubes, and so didn't get the blip on the back that explained that it was female comic book artists addressing the subject of how much they liked dudes. i thought the book would collect comics-based commentary on masculinity that was a little more biting. i didn't see much of the "wry" look at maledom in the collected stories; it was much more often a little too "worshipy" for my tastes.

some of the stories were painful, cliched takes on heteronormative male-female interaction ("he didn't even notice when i changed my hair!" in "sigh..." by yali lin, "i could never date a boy that wasn't stronger and smarter than me," in "nemi" by lisa myrhe), and some others were kind of boring. one, "porn," by lorena caiazzo, includes the mis-information that women aren't as visually stimulated as men, and ends with the statement that all porn is "awesome." um.

however, the collection of so many female comics artists together is a really great thing all in all, even if it did turn out to be "the straight girl's guide to straight guy stuff" that i wasn't expecting. although it includes some artists i already love, like roberta gregory and dorothy gambrell, i was introduced to many artists that i hadn't heard from before, and i would love to find more work by hellen jo, monica gallagher, vicky hsu & anita cheng, mk reed, cathy leamy, julia durgee, t. streeter, and cynthia ward & katie skelly. there are a healthy number of really solid artistic works in this book, and even a few tiny masterpieces. definitely worth having, even for a person like me who isn't all that into dudes. except for occasionally being one.

i was referring to an ANAL douche, btw

i made a tiny comment on whenfangirlsattack about my disrespect for the blogging pattern of this one "mad thinker scott" guy and one of the moderators very diplomatically and fairly replied that they don't discriminate based on my opinions of douchery.

well, the disrespected blogger himself wrote a blog entry about MY little comment! boy, am i blushing!

you can read it here or catch the link from whenfangirlsattack: would you like spikes with your douche, ma'am?.

and this is for you, scott: Hi, Mr. Scott! I like your little piece on Prism Comics about the superhero costumes designed by fans in the 70's! It's super-gay-licious!

ooh! my pinkies hurt from all that shift-key pressing. i won't do THAT again soon.

anyway, scott, i'm sure we'll "talk" again soon. it always makes me very sad when when i meet gay men who hate women.

ComicBookResources' "Homosexuality in Comics"

CBR's Homosexuality in Comics Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

i just skimmed through most of this. all three parts have a lot of little coming-out stories. if you've been gay for long enough, they all start to sound the same. mine is so generic i don't bother telling people anymore ("i always knew i was different, i just didn't know what kind of different...i came out to my parents in a letter in my second year of college...").

first, interesting choice with the title. "homosexuality" has a clinical feel to it, to me. i guess using "gay" or "queer" would bring up the negative connotations people (cavepeople, maybe) associate with those words.

i also thought lillian diaz-przbyl's comments on yaoi versus "gay comics" in japan were interesting. i'd really like to get my hands on these "gay comics" that are different from yaoi & yuri. i've never seen them. unless she's referring to shonen-ai or shoujo-ai comics? she specifically talks about how they're for different audiences in japan (yaoi for straight girls/women, "gay comics" for gay people). curious. the list of titles she's worked on for blu comics are kind of yucky to me--"loveless," with its NAMBLA overtones, not cool.

i guess the thing is that while i enjoy sex in comics, i generally balk at the formula in yaoi (i've had almost no luck finding yuri in america, unless "chirality" counts) with the older/younger, dominant/passive, seme/uke characters, and the rape-y sexual encounters and the invisible-penis thing, and nobody ever using lube!

anyway, back the the comicbookresources.com article on homosexuality in comics. pretty interesting sort of round-up of authors and titles that have dealt with gay characters.

i think they tried really hard to have stuff about both gay men and lesbians as represented in comics, but they only had two lesbians to talk about. it's also interesting that many of the gay men comic characters they talked about were in couples where both of them were superheroes.

i'm waiting to read part IV.

an article about trans characters would be interesting too.

O! Hellblazer!

an ode in words and picture, to queerness in hellblazer

O! Hellblazer,
as if your darkly churning,
demon-infested,
black-magic,
anti-hero plotlines
weren't enough to keep me
reading all these years,
your man-on-man smooches
seal the 7th seal on my heart.

some of the kisses are
disgusting...



some are just awful cute
(even tho' they are with future
evil megalomaniacs)...



and others are awful sexy...



check out the tongue action...




and these other special moments,
while sometimes depictions of evil,
are just too fun...



this one is just funny, and strange, and great...



o! hellblazer! thanks for the queers! intended or not.

Recently-Read-Reviews

first off, i want to post a picture from the NY pride parade. all my pictures totally sucked, and this one does too, but at least it's of drag versions of Wonder Woman and Supergirl holding hands. i can't remember for sure, but i think they were holding a sign saying they'd been happily married for a number of years, or something to that effect. they were a big hit, at least to me. gaw bless those two gay nerds for dressing up as super women.

on to some reviews of recently-read comics.

Steady Beat by rivkah

i expected this comic to be a little clumsy because it's by a young, new comics artist, and i expected it to be written to a younger audience. but i was still pretty disappointed by it. the most interesting thing that happens is that the younger sister/main character, leah, finds a love letter written by a girl to her sister. it's a pretty important plot point that should get the ball rolling (ha ha, the main characters are soccer players, anyways--) but it happens at the very beginning and doesn't actually seem to kick anything off at all (i just did it again). finding a lesbian love letter to your sister seems like it would really shake you up and make you ask a lot of questions, and at least put you on edge for awhile, but leah, while mildly curious about who the girlfriend is, doesn't seem very psychologically invested in the mystery. the rest of the book is about her meeting "cute" boys and encountering unfunny "comedic" situations and characters. the central conflict ends up seeming pretty tepid. the "queer tease" at the beginning with the love letter doesn't pan out to anything involving the actual lesbians in question, although maybe it will in subsequent volumes. i have to say the author has potential and will probably get better with more titles. at least most of the art is pretty solid, although the weird facial proportions are troubling.

another side of this book that i feel a little squirmy about is that it is labeled "manga" even though it is by a non-japanese person in not-japan. i often feel very, very embarassed for people i know in america trying to imitate a japanese style. i was a teacher's assistant for a drawing class a few years back, and one of the girls did all her drawings in a terrible, terrible fake-manga style. i wanted to cry for her everyday. rivkah, the author of "steady beat," is a good artist, but the fake-manga of it still bothers me. i can't help but feel a shame for the cultural appropriation of it. but that's maybe just my shit.

American Born Chinese by gene luen yang

there's nothing queer in this story, unfortunately, unless you'd like to read the whole cultural minority thing as a queer experience, which i'm sure you're welcome to do.

i liked the graphic art style and the use of folktales as allegory. the story of the chinese-american boy struggling with his identity as the child of chinese immigrants in a mostly-white school is very effectively told. however, i thought the author pulled some punches. instead of any real critique of the white community's treatment of the chinese-american community, he instead seems to emphasize that we should all just accept ourselves, recognize what damage shame about our heritage can do to our souls, and live happily ever after. a lot of the varied and complicated feelings and situations that stem from being a descendent of immigrants of color in a racist society get dropped on the wayside in the story. i couldn't help but think (much too bitterly, i'm sure) that overcoming my personal shame would not keep me from being killed in iran for being a gay feminist jew-lover. i know that's an entirely different scenario, but there are connections between them.

i also wondered at the very stereotypical treatment of dating, and (heterosexual) teenage relationships in the story. did the author mean to make the situations seems very dull, so that the emphasis on the cultural and racial issues could come out more obviously?

(perhaps my criticisms also stem from the loud-mouthed clerk at the comic book store where i bought the book. he was loudly stating everything he liked and disliked about certain comics, whether anyone was listening or not, and at some point he saw me pick up "american born chinese" and he started shouting what he thought of it to the other clerk, as if i maybe i would think it was cool that he had noticed me or something. hate the guy.)

anyway, i mostly enjoyed reading american born chinese, and am interested in the other things gene luen yang has worked on, or will work on in the future.

xxxHolic by CLAMP

i found xxxHolic at the local library and decided to try it out, even though "by the authors of chobits!!" was stamped on the front of each book. i realize CLAMP has written a ton of stuff, but the fact that the publisher decided to draw a connection to chobits specifically, a title i found totally disgusting, threw me off.

the opening scenario is that a young orphan (who is good, and kind, and can cook and clean, but is very whiny and complainy, and can see spirits) named watanuki gets trapped into servitude by a sexy, quirky, older (i think--who can tell what age she is supposed to be portrayed as?) magical woman. that's all we need to get the series off. i enjoy the magical/spiritual bent of the stories. and there's even a bit of queerness being hinted at in the stories. i haven't read enough of it yet, but watanuki seems to be developing a sort of screwball comedy romance with a male friend, even though he's been crushing on a cute girl from the beginning of the first book. i'm rooting for the boys, of course.

maybe i'm just a sucker for sexy "older" women myself, and wouldn't mind falling into yuuko-san's clutches, personally. if i was a manga character instead of a real person, of course.

the interplay between the characters is nuanced enough that the story manages to mostly escape big cliche characterizations (the hero overcoming his tragic past, the cute-innocent-love-interest- girl, the stoic male pal) and the presence of the ambiguous "dimensional witch" helps. however, many of the plotlines reveal an odd bias against women and girls. the clients that come to the witch are all women, and all are harshly punished for behaving outside of the gender norm. one character is revealed to have killed her friend, but no reason at all is given for it. one just has to assume it was her natural, female, jealous, murderous, impulse. and obviously the bitch deserves to die for her crime.

on a side note, if i had not picked up xxxHolic, i would never have known that "cardcaptor sakura" has a gay love story (or two) in it. there are descriptions of xxxHolic's connections to other CLAMP stories in the back of each book, and xxxHolic is connected to the tsubasa reservoir chronicle (or whatever the hell it's called) story, which is itself an off-shoot of "cardcaptor sakura." yay gay love stories!

First Rant - Sexism and the Manga Heroine

since i have an extremely unfilling job in a cubicle for a dot com, i spend most of my day looking at stuff on the internet. stuff that's not at all related to my job, of course. lately i've been lurking around the "women and comics" sites, like When Fangirls Attack, and girlwonder.org, and places like that. the amount of misogyny and homophobia that comes out when comic book nerd boys get angry is astonishing. obviously there are lots of reasons why members of society who are generally benefitting from being part of an oppressive group react this way to criticism, even of such generally thought of as inconsequential matter as comic books. but that subject is covered much better by a lot of other bloggers and i'm not going to go into it right now. what i'd like to address is a small thing, something that is often kind of tossed into the argument as if it is a well-established fact. it's the idea that manga is an inherently non-sexist comics alternative that is more women-friendly than DC or Marvel (and according to some angry nerd boys, women should just be happy they have manga, and stop critiquing mainstream American comics).

my response to this is that manga is hardly a feminist utopia. for one thing, the term "manga" is generally used to refer to almost any kind of graphic novel format that comes out of Japan. any statement lumping all manga into one category is a gross generalization. i've even heard a lot of women describe manga as egalitarian. i'd have to assume that we're not including hentai titles, or boner-ific manga for adult men, or even most shonen stuff. personally, i've found manga to have just as many problems with sexism (and racism) as american-made comics have, and that's just within the mostly shojo stuff that i've read over time. the different culture results in a different form of sexism, but it's definitely there.

i remember how excited when i first found Ranma 1/2 in high school. as i read more of the comics and watched the tv episodes (and horrible movies, and OVAs) i slid more and more towards disappointment when i realized that despite Ranma's constant sex-changing, there was still an overarching binary gender role system that had to be conformed to, at least by the end of the story or episode. akane always had to fail at whatever she tried, and ranma could save her, because even though sometimes he had a female body, he was still really a guy. i realize that the series did put in some little things that showed that 'girlishness' is mostly learned behavior, like when ranma starts liking sweets (something that in japan is mostly attributed to women). it wasn't enough for me. the same formula of heroine who just isn't strong enough needing to ultimately be saved by some guy, usually her eventual boyfriend/husband, applies to tons and tons of shojo and shojo-shonen crossover titles. it even happens in series that have super-powered girls as the main characters (i.e., sailor moon, which i always hated). even the often-strong female supporting characters had unfortunately sexist characteristics. in ranma 1/2, shampoo is an almost unbeatable opponent for anybody (except ranma), but she is happy to use her "feminine wiles" to get what she wants most of the time. she's sneaky and manipulative, and shallow.

since high school (many years ago), i've been hunting for satisfyingly strong heroines in manga. they're really not that easy to find, especially in manga that isn't for small children. certainly i want heroines that are believable, and human, and have shortcomings like real people. but why do the shortcomings always have to be "she faints a lot," or "she's just not strong enough," or "her spirit is too weak," or "her love of a certain boy makes her too vulnerable," or "she's extremely simple-minded (but cute!!)," or whatever?

there was an statement made in an interview with hagio moto that i read online (somewhere, i can't remember the exact site, but the interviewer was matt thorn). she commented that one of the reasons that shonen-ai manga became popular was because women are very critical of other women, and female characters in stories. therefore, making the main character a young boy (who falls in love with another boy) let the female reader identify more readily and positively with the main character. this is an interesting statement, and a sad one. i think it's still true in both japanese and american culture that women are taught to hate themselves, and to put anything that's considered "feminine" hierarchically lower than what's considered "masculine." this can even apply to who the female reader identifies with in a story. i think it's similar to the idea in american children's and young adult literature that it's a better bet to make the story about a boy, because while both boys and girls can identify with a male protagonist, boys can't identify with a female protagonist.

unfortunately, a lot of manga with a male protagonist that's about "boy love," be it shonen-ai or yaoi, deals very harshly with its female characters (if they're present at all). usually they're bitchy, or monstrously controlling, or just in the way all the time. and don't get me started on the extremely problematic frequency of rape-themed sex scenes in yaoi. yikes. i can't help but think of how the "uke" is usually coded as "feminine," and the sex scenes always pan out to the Dominant Masculine raping the Passive Feminine and it's all supposed to be So Very Sexy. i'll probably post on this topic a lot more after this.

getting back to the search for heroines in manga, there are other factors that turn me away from titles that could promise strong female characters. most of the stuff that makes it to america is for children or preteens, or is just too fluffy for me to enjoy. i read japanese at about a 1st grade level and it's a real struggle to read the more adult stuff i find in its original language. being a big gay gay wad, i also get turned off by stuff that is just about straight romance between the heroine and some boy(s).

anway, some of the stuff i've enjoyed through the years: inu-yasha (both kagome and kikyo are strong characters, kikyo especially is a bad-ass), revolutionary girl utena (although anthy is uber-passive, utena is a very intriguing heroine), basara (although the love-interest subplot is annoying), and joan (except for the distressing and unnecessary rape scene).

i think it would be a good idea to examine some of the more popular shojo manga from the last few decades and compare the heroines. it will give me a good excuse to read more manga, anyway. and i can pretend i'm doing something productive.

My Comics Timeline

1987 - My older brother found the 2nd collection of Elfquest at a garage sale. I read it about 1,000 times but he still refused to give it to me.

1987-1989 - I sneak into my brother's room whenever he's at a friend's house, or on a boyscouts camping trip, or whatever, and read as many of his DC and Marvel comics as I can. I read through all the SpiderMan comics I could find, and followed them up with SpiderHam comics, for a different perspective. Those comic-book protector bags were the bane of my existence--I was trying to keep my brother from finding out i was reading his comics and the sticky thing on the bags would sometimes stick to the front of a comic while i was taking it out and rip a patch of color off...oops. In this timeframe, I also discovered a small stash of naked lady pictures my brother had. I found them frightening.

1990-1995 - Obsession with Elfquest continued. I was still reading a few of my brother's comics, but my interest in straight superhero stuff was waning, probably because of the lack of female characters that I could identify with. I remember kind of liking Spawn.

1996 - Discovery of anime and manga. Mostly Ranma 1/2. I usually had to find someone to drive an hour with me to get to the closest store that sold manga or anime videos. On one of these trips, I randomly chose "A, A' " by Moto Hagio. My first gay-themed manga.

1997-2000 - No time for reading comics because I was too busy being a gay college student.

2001 - Find a comic-book store downtown that didn't make me feel intimidated. There was even a gay comics section. Most of it looked really crappy to me at the time. I only liked Allison Bechdel. My first Banana Fish book was bought at this time. When I went back in to ask the store clerk if he could order more of them, he says, "Banana Fish...I looked at that one and it just wasn't any good." Yeah, whatever, just put in the damn order!

2002-2005 Frequent manga purchases online or at the Golden Apple in L.A. Infrequent glancing at independent comics.

2006 - For some reason, I inspired my girlfriend to read comics. She found some interesing non-manga titles at her local comic store, and I became interested in non-Japanese comics again. We read through everything by Los Bros Hernandez that we could get our sweaty meat-hooks on.

2007- Started a blog about comics.