OTHELLO (Toui Hasumi)

If I had to guess which yaoi books on my shelf be legitimatly tear-inducing, Othello would probably have been in the bottom half of that list. An R16 that looks kind of like a lame vampire story with that gothic cover font? Nah. Yet, as it turned out, to say Othello was moving, beautiful, and heartbreaking would be an understatement – this book absolutely came out of left field. I guess really I just wasn’t expecting it to be so touching, much less serious.

You’re probably wondering what the hell is so special about your standard oversize mid-2000s R16 June book, of which there are dozens. Trust me, I was surprised too.

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LOVE QUEST (Lily Hoshino)

Love Quest is the book that popped my Lily Hoshino virginity. I was starting to get self-conscious about it, so figured I better suck up the pain and get it over with. Despite countless ads in the back of June books touting her as the ‘queen of yaoi’ (a title which I can only assume was bestowed by someone who clearly has not read a lot of yaoi), her work does not generally appeal to me, because you honestly can’t tell who has a penis and who doesn’t in a lot of her stories. At least for one character in this one it turned out to be correct – though the two (three?) ukes all looked very, very feminine. Too feminine. I mean come on, that dude on the right looks like he’s about to shoot a Maybelline commercial.

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SEVEN DAYS (Rihito Takarai): The Originals and Reprints, Side by Side

Note: this is an old article and probably needs some historical context. The jist is that at one point this series was extremely popular and a hot seller for DMP, driven off the popularity of the mangaka’s other work Ten Count, and they tried to either save a buck or speed up the printing process by using the “print on demand” method, which gave them questionable results that were much-lampooned online at the time. June later lost the license to this series and SuBLime republished it in omnibus format in a rare license rescue endeavor, making June’s edition not as valuable or sought after as it used to be.

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Thanks to Seven Days, I haven’t heard so much hullabaloo about the reprints of a yaoi series since Junjo Romantica. The yaoi forums and blogs I follow lit up with more fife about this than CNN did about the most recent North Korean nuke launch. And you can guess which one was a more important issue, I’m sure. But seriously, I wanted to know if the quality discrepancy was really as big as people were saying. If you’re a regular reader, you know that I buy/sell/trade a lot of yaoi and manga in general, and I just happened to have the reprints come down that stream last month. So I decided to compare them to the original printings in my collection and inform you on the findings. Are you in the market for this ridiculously expensive and sought after series thanks to Ten Count, and aren’t sure how many fecks to give about the issue? Hit the jump to find out!

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ZESTY (Yaoi Press/Studio Kosen)

Zesty is apparently a free shounen-ai web comic made by Studio Kosen/Kosaru, the Spanish studio whose work is often featured in US-based Yaoi Press Publishing. I say “apparently” because the introduction mentions it, I haven’t read the webcomic. If they said it was subversive literature encoded with secrets symbols to bring down the regime of Kim Jong Un, I would just as easily believe that.

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A KING’S LESSON (Futaba/Mitsuba)

…in which I learned that apparently Japan isn’t really familiar with Christmas lights. I know they don’t really celebrate it like we do but I definitely saw them on the trees when I was in Japan around November, maybe they just don’t associate them with the holiday? Hmm. Oh, also, there’s a weird weiner in here. Like, not that I’m a professional, but I’m pretty sure they’re not supposed to look like a wet finger.

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