This might be the only “BL” manga in existence where two people get dissolved in acid baths, but no men actually make contact with each other sexually in any way, shape, or form. I wish I was kidding.
I did indeed read this, I am sure of it. My eyeballs looked at the words and pictures on each page, but my brain had a hard time translating them into any sort of cohesive anything, it was such a garbled mess of idea, characters, and words – maybe I won’t even try. It’s about like…ancient Chinese assassins and NYC gang warfare? Something like that. When I was somewhere around the middle of trying in vain to process this book, I looked it up on mangaupdates for some info on how and why this mess came to be and discovered some very important information – this is the sequel to another series, one that was not licensed in English. *facepalm* Grandma June was just off her meds again guys, nothing to see here. Maybe we should take away her car keys…
By the way, this isn’t even the first time that June has done this either (see Millenium Darling 2006). I’m not sure what was going on in the DMP offices in the mid 00s but I don’t think we can rule out the staff rolling some big fat Bob Marley doobs immediately preceding licensing decision meeting.
God of Dogs is the sequel to a series called Charisma. This series was never licensed and isn’t even scanlated (more on Charisma below) so US readers would have had no way to even access the first part. In the very back of this book, the author mentions Charisma briefly and that it was published “around the same time,” with only a small hint that they’re linked at all. I really want to stress that **nowhere** in this book does it say or suggest that this is a sequel title of any sort. I guess small details like ‘hey, this book won’t make any sense if you haven’t read the series before it’ were too insignificant for June to bother us with. But even though I discovered this about halfway through the story, I chose not to pause it and search around for Charisma first – like 95% of readers would pick up this book thinking the story starts here and there is no information to suggest otherwise, unless you Google-fu it like me assuming you didn’t give up on it before then, which is a big assumption (Books usually start at the beginning of a story? How dumb of us, I know). So that’s how I wanted to write the review, as an innocent** babe who just casually picked up this title and started reading, like the other fujos who gets their manga from $2 clearance bins. **sike
This manga will be such an incoherent mess to people who haven’t read Charisma (which will be, like, 100% of people who can’t read Japanese) but this is what I gathered anyway: there’s like an ancient Chinese assassin family called the Tsais, and they’re on the hunt for their last estranged family member with a pure bloodline named Yue Sham. Ok, got it. Then the scene switches to a juvenile ruffian named Archer Rogue on his way to prison. Wait, is this supposed to be Yue Sham? But first he stops at a hospital and visits someone named Murphy, who seems mentally handicapped. Wait, how are they connected? Then two cop characters come in, investigating a body being dissolved in acid. Wait, who are they? Then Archer and another person named Ling are rescued from a police van en route to prison by Yee Fah, and there’s bodies everywhere, then Ling is actually Yue Sham, and then they’re being held prisoner in Miami with another one of the Tsais, then Yee Fah tries to run off with Ling, then Archer’s actually Yue Sham? and I’m like…the fuck are all these people? The fuck is going on?
Trying to pass the middle of a story as a standalone title goes about as well as you would expect. Characters are never introduced, backstory is built on that is never explained, the panels are messy, and context is missing from just about everything. It feels like watching a movie where you leave the room for 10 minutes at a time every other scene, and then try to piece it together. It doesn’t have a real ending either, nothing is really resolved, and it’s clear there was supposed to be a part after this.
So as a standalone story, it’s barely passable. But as a standalone BL, it must not be awful right? Surely there’s boy love action here at least? Oh wait, you thought there would be reason this was licensed by June, a BL imprint? Ha. Haha. Hahahahahahaha. June laughs in the face of logical assumptions. Only like 3/4 of the way through this BL manga do we get any hint of a pairing. I nearly forgot I was reading yaoi. This is literally the spiciest it gets. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it:
I’m like ‘oh, is THIS the gay part? Do these two fuck?’ Well it’s a 16+ rating so of course they don’t, but this was literally the first hint anyone in this book that anyone was gay much less paired with another character. They bait and switched us though! Place your bets folks, at the very end, the game of Guess Who (is Fucking) has a winner and the pairing iiiiis *drumroll* – Kohki and Archer! Yes that’s right, a freaking cop and a juvenile KID he was involved with in a case are in love? Possibly fucked? Who knows. Maybe that’s why Kohki is so buddy-buddy with an FBI agent, he’s hoping they’ll look the other way while he rails a juvenile delinquent while on the job. Ok then!
Ishihara is a pretty prolific mangaka, who mainly does yaoi. Both of these things came as a surprise to me given this final product. For the most part the panels look rough and unfinished, like she got bored making it. I was even bored looking at most of them. She wasn’t an amateur at this point and had been making manga for a while (and she actually still is), so it’s hard to give her a pass for that. I am sure her style has evolved since the 90s-00s though. You see this kind of style a lot in yaoi from around this time, perhaps she was simply copying what was popular.
I don’t want to be unfair to Ishihara because it’s not her fault that June makes boneheaded licensing decisions, and it’s really only fair to judge her story taken together with Charisma since that’s how she wrote it. I tried to track down Charisma for this review, but only the first chapter is scanlated, and the rest of the raws aren’t online anywhere. So I looked into buying the ebook version, better flipping through it in moon runes than nothing. This is when I made another discovery – Charisma is four tankobon volumes long. Yes, God of Dogs is built on four fucking volumes of backstory that aren’t available in English, that readers here would have no idea about. JUNE, Y U DO DIS. Actually, the fact that it’s four volumes may very well be at least one of the reasons. Having read this first chapter, there are three possible others reasons, which are:
1) The art is even more dated and rough-looking to the point that the characters don’t even look the same; this is Archer on the left in Charisma and Archer on the right in God of Dogs. I get that the left one is a low-fidelity jpeg screenshot but there’s still a pretty obvious difference.
2) Characters have conversations about totally normal and non-offensive things like castrating colored people.
3) Character violence, which is plentiful, does not exclude handicapped children. Also, the first chapter literally ends with Archer whacking/stabbing some guy in the neck who is trying to rape him with a nail-studded piece of plywood.
So if that’s just chapter 1, I imagine it gets dicier from there on out. Not that a title with a lot of violence or fucked up shit can’t or hasn’t gotten licensed in English (see: Scarlet, Kirepapa, Brother), but those titles were typically done by other imprints that are more ok with contentious content. June tended to favor the softer romance fluff and mostly avoided riskier stuff. That begs the question then, why on earth they chose God of Dogs – even looking past the fact that they picked a middle without a beginning. I guess they can only answer that. I like that the plot is violent, dark, and much more complex then you’ll usually find in BL, which would be great and refreshing if we actually had access to the whole story.
The one chapter we have in Charisma actually solved at least one mystery in God of Dogs though – in the beginning of the latter story, Archer goes to visit a blonde kid named Murphy on his way to prison, but it doesn’t say who he is – it’s just clear he is dear to Archer and has some mental handicap. Chapter 1 of Charisma mostly focuses on this relationship and it turns out he’s his brother or half-brother. Then Murphy tries to stab him with a fork, just like their dad did when he severed the tendons in Archer’s hand (another reveal that we never knew about – in God of Dogs it showed him looking at the scar on his hand a lot, but never said anything about it. It also told us that he shot the dad, but didn’t say why. I guess we were just supposed to infer that he was an abusive asshole). Ah, squeaky clean family fun!
Although I was unsuccessful in finding scans of Charisma, the search revealed some interesting tidbits, such as it started as a doujin and then got licensed because some publisher really liked the brother tale I guess. It wasn’t clear if it even started as a BL, and there was no hint that it would be in that first chapter. I also found out that it was well-received, and it was re-released three different times. Perhaps it rode on the coattails of Banana Fish? Who knows. Ishihara has found a niche in creating darker BL tales seemingly inspired by crime dramas, which is cool. It’s a shame that English readers cannot read Charisma because if we were able to, we would no doubt enjoy God of Dogs a lot more. Or, at the very least, have an idea of who the characters are and what happened leading up to this. You know, minor things like that.
TL;DR: This dark and rather complex crime drama is the sequel of a four-volume series called Charisma that was never licensed and is not available online in English. Nowhere are readers informed of this, unless you get curious about why nothing makes sense and Google it. Puzzinglingly, June evidently hoped it could be read as a standalone. This is not the case, however – you will be very confused and have little idea what is going on. Characters are never introduced, no context or backstory is ever explained, you’ll just be going “wait, what?” the entire time. To top it all off, the art is pretty meh and there is only a small whiff of any kind of BL pairing in here, and not even a hug or kiss. June not only shortchanged the readers with this release but also Ishihara herself, who judging by Japanese reviews of Charisma wrote a pretty decent story that we are basically reading the middle of.