This is a very early June title, among the first releases on the imprint in the early 00s after they smelled the success of Tokyopop’s gamble on Gravitation and decided they wanted a hot slice. Similar to their other multi-volume early titles like Il Gatto sul G, Our Kingdom, and Gorgeous Carat, they weren’t really ready to license anything all that raunchy yet – at least until Tokyopop put out Junjo Romantica on their BLU imprint and all bets were off. And, at 7 volumes, La Esperanca tied with Our Kingdom as the longest series on the June imprint for about a decade – until they did Ayano Yamane’s Finder and The Tyrant Falls in Love much later on, unfortunately for both series (Finder was license-rescued by Sublime and no one really knows what the fuck is going on with Tyrant yet).
Why the dearth of long series between this time? The first reason is obvious, they present more upfront commitment and expense than one-shots, and the 2008 economic downturn didn’t help things. The manga industry in general also came to realize that the sales of manga series, especially longer ones, largely ride off the back of an anime, and the BL category has scant entries in that regard – so, one-shots and the shorter series (under 10-12 volumes) are definitely safer bets. This is starting to change and there are exceptions, but by and large, BL series in the west are ‘short and sweet’ and longer ones are not gambled on unless they have an anime to help sales. Back in the early 00s though, the Western market was horny for any BL and DMP wanted to filled that hole (!). How has this series aged and is it still worth reading so many years later? Let’s find out!
La Esperanca is set at an all boys’ Catholic school named St Grollo in some fictional European location. The setting has a lot of bearing on several key story elements and having gone to Catholic school my whole life, I can say that it was portrayed was pretty accurate and maybe even triggered some latent PTSD for me – the nuns (shudder), going to mass, rosaries that you do *not* wear around your neck (Catholics aren’t supposed to do this, I see this a lot in manga with religious themes and it amuses me – Japan is not a Christian country so this is obviously understandable but it makes me giggle). I’m not exactly sure how effective the experience was as you can clearly see I now have a large gay Japanese porn collection that I blog about, but that’s psychoanalysis for another time.
The short blonde one above is Georges and the tall one is the principal’s delinquent son, Robert, and their romance or lack thereof is the central story of this manga. Georges – a talented pianist, model student, and a devout Catholic – couldn’t look or act more like a stereotypical uke if he tried, and his downturned puppy dog eyes and naive innocence, warm personality, and love for seemingly everyone makes him popular on campus. Robert on the other hand is a sour-tempered troublemaker, and he and Georges couldn’t be more different – but perhaps for this reason they become drawn to each other.
Even though this series is on the June imprint and “yaoi manga” is emblazoned on the bottom half of the covers in that colored stripe, it’s barely a shounen-ai at all. You’ll have to downgrade your BL expectations to ‘romantically ambiguous closeness’ – there’s a lot of ‘oops i tripped and touched you’ or ‘we’re having a heated conversation so our mouths are close together’ type of situations. The one single established relationship in here until the end is a straight one from a side story, and only one minor character is actually gay. There is a very small amount of kissing and it’s presented ambiguously – it’s like she went out of her way to NOT draw it, as if the magazine this ran in didn’t allow it or something. I actually wonder if the story was originally supposed to be a shounen-ai at all; perhaps they just felt the concept of an all-boys-school manga without any ongoing straight romance wasn’t really going to make a splash with any crowd but the fujos.
The series was started in the late 90s and has an attractive, nostalgic art style from that period with big expressive eyes and well-delineated hair. The series had a very slow release schedule, one volume a year, and though it ended nearly in the late 00s the art style doesn’t change much – thank God, because BL art trended to ugly around that time. Save for the occasional ‘dorito chin,’ Chigusa-san largely avoids badly exaggerated proportions like yaoi hands or giant lips, and generally I felt like the nice art was a big highlight. Outdated, sure, but pretty all the same.
The characters definitely all feel like stock all-boys-school paper cutouts, but they were all cute at least. My main gripe is that Robert and Henri weren’t really drawn differently enough, and I kept confusing them. This mangaka loves to crop faces in her panels, so you could only occasionally see the tell-tale difference in their hair part.
As far as the story – there’s definitely ‘things that happen’ – it’s a 7 book series so there better damn well be – but by and large these things don’t really move the plot along much or develop the characters until vol 4, and when they do it still goes at a snail’s pace. This is especially obvious in hindsight, where several things I remember taking up huge sections of the story didn’t really ever matter. Combined with the lack of much romantic development, it has a sort of slice of life feel. Even when things happen that do have to do with the relationship between Georges and Robert, it’s still frustratingly slow and often silly, like “Georges is angsty because he can’t talk about his feelings’ goes on for literally 3-4 volumes. New characters wander in and out of the main characters’ lives, but they largely serve to either create drama or reveal a flashback relative to the plot, and few really manage to take on a life of their own.
This mangaka LOVES the zig-zag panel construction, like maybe a little too much…the constant heavy cropping of the characters’ faces makes some scenes feel too claustrophobic which is not easy to achieve in a 7.25×9 book, and the fact that it was used for almost every conversation dramatic or otherwise – particularly towards the end of the series as many revelations happen at once – dulled its effectiveness as a highlight tool. It’s not like I hate this way of paneling, at least it’s easy to follow, but it was definitely overused.
It felt unnecessary too since I sort of doubt page count limit was ever an issue with this series since it had a once-a-year-only release; if anything its problem is that it’s too *many* pages. I really felt like the length worked against it – this really did not need to be 7 volumes. The main story could have easily been told in about 4, and unless she actually was going for a slice of life thing, the pacing is off and a ton of stuff that had nothing to do with anything could have been cut out. Additionally, several issues, fights, drama, or minor plotlines that get spread out over several chapters could have easily been resolved much sooner, and probably should have been. For most of the story you’re left feeling frustrated because you’re expecting this to be a BL and those elements don’t really surface as much as most readers are probably assuming they will in a 7-volume series. I think there is actually more fighting and non-romantic drama in here than BL elements. Probably it was cancelled or she had to wrap it up sooner than expected for some other reason, because what ends up happening is that a whole crap ton of plot is shoved into the last volume. The ‘main’ plot was good, but the story really gets going waaaaay too late, and had it been spread out evenly among the volumes and better-paced it would have been far more effective. On the bright side however, it is a very wholesome and positive story with characters that you want to root for, and a nice ending. It’s very close to being great for beginners, but I think it’s just too long with a lot of nothing happening in the first half for me to recommend it to BL newbies.
Chigusa Kawaii was not a prolific mangaka, and only has four series listed on mangaupdates – all of which are high school boy dramas, and so she clearly likes this setting and these kinds of characters. Two of these series are in English on the DokiDoki imprint, which sought to be the ‘gateway drug’ into BL for shojo readers. The fact that this imprint has some of her work makes total sense in light of the fact that La Esperanca is the lightest and softest of shounen-ais, so these other two series may very well simply just be shojos with fanservice. One is about a music school and Georges actually make an appearance (Alice the 101st), and the other is a school vampire BL light novel she illustrated (I Want to Bite). Her fourth work was done sort of recently in 2019, a twelve year gap between that and her last series, and is apparently still ongoing. It actually looks exactly like La Esperanca except it’s just listed as a shojo, so at least she dropped the shounen-ai facade. Perhaps this was the story she wanted to make in the first place?
TL;DR: This 7-volume series isnt really as much a shounen-ai as it it a very wholesome slice of life set at an all boys’ school with occasional amorous undertones, at least until the very last volume. Any body contact that happens is mostly a result of fighting, and “romantically ambiguous closeness” is about what the BL part consists of until the last volume. I had high hopes for it during the 1st volume because it has some really cute and nostalgic 90s art, but I got impatient with it by the middle as it just sort of lallygagged along with episodic nothings filling the pages in lieu of any romantic development. The main plot is good but it gets moving far too late and all the important developments feels smushed into the last two volumes – it does have a good ending at least, but all in all it could have been about half the length. It’s a charming manga, but not much of a BL.