I had an inkling that this book was going to be bad. Partly a premonition based on the art style, followed by an educated guess based on the fact that it’s a Kitty title. Ages ago a read a brief review of it saying it was trash, and that nugget of info apparently stayed with me as well. ‘Trash’ may be too nice a descriptor though in this case – it sounds too polite. I’m gonna slightly bump it up a level to ‘hot garbage.’ It’s terrible even by Kitty standards and makes the likes even the bottom of the barrel of BL look like Tezuka works. While reading I was on the lookout for the answer to the question of why they wanted to license this, but I never did find it. Even halfway through, this dumpster fire was still managing to go downhill with no brakes.
Poison Cherry Drive is just completely and utterly nonsensical. Picture a non-sequitur joke manga in which half of the jokes are either not funny, lost in translation, or both. ‘Cherry Drive’ is apparently ‘a mysterious, gay site that helps people get revenge for a rape, or ravish a warm body for the night.’ Evidently rape revenge and prostitution are related? The owners of this operation are Ai Iida and Mamezo Takano, who would 100% be running some weirdass fetish gay cam model site in the modern year.
Throughout the book various interested ‘clients’ appear seeking, well, exactly what Cherry Drive offers. My personal favorite was a CEO who wanted to experiment to see if he was gay, because I find it hot in stories when high-status characters who always seem in control lose a bit of it. The rest of the characters were just annoying to me more than anything.
In several places I wondered if the pages were bound in the wrong order because nothing made sense, even for a gag manga. They frequently also suggested there was about to be a steamy sex scene, and then when you turned the page they just completely went on to something else. Motoni knows exactly what we want to see and is perfectly capable of drawing it, but she finds ways not to as much as possible, even resorting to replacing people with generic circle faces in the few steamy scenes. I guess it was supposed to be funny but I just found it annoying, because there was not much sex to begin with. She has them talking and joking about it far more than she actually draws it. For a Kitty title especially, and one with zero story, this one comes up disappointingly short in the peen department (no pun intended).
Motoni is a capable artist, but she is mostly phoning it in for this one. Combined with the ridiculous ‘plot,’ not much sex and with awful censoring, the cherry on top (zing) was that it had some uncomfortable and unfunny rape-related gags. I know that dubcon/noncon isn’t always what it seems in yaoi, but it’s set up with a pretty serious tone regarding rape (trigger warning), and then they just kind of make a big joke out of it. When the first client Nihongi-kun asks Cherry Drive for help in getting revenge, they ask him to ‘pay with his body’ in exchange for their help. So yes, they essentially ask a rape victim to prostitute himself to them in exchange for their help in getting revenge, which turns out to be them kidnapping the rapist, tying him up shibari-like, and then gang raping him. An eye for an eye?
I think that probably illustrates the biggest issue with this book for me, which was the tone mixture. The serious bits and the comedy bits were thrown together haphazardly and flipped between the two seemingly at random, making the drama have no weight and the comedy unfunny. I did laugh out loud at a few parts, mostly due to silly dialogue, but they were drowned out in gags or jokes that was totally lost in translation.
Motoni is a decent artist and her other English-licensed work is Dog Style, which I haven’t read but hear is pretty good. The rest of her work is less comedy and more serious, which I think suits her style far better. I think you’d either have to be really into silly gag manga or really into Modoru Motoni to enjoy this one.
I think towards the end everyone is asking themselves the obvious question, which is clearly, ‘when is OPEC going to enter this story?’ Well don’t worry one bit, ye of little faith, because OPEC and gay love go hand-in-hand as everyone knows so it would only make perfect sense for that to happen. In fact, I think everyone needs to write to OPEC right now and demand that they make all of their secret gay hush-money plots public. If I stop updating this blog, they probably have me in a secret underground lair somewhere for talking about this. Hopefully the kind with hot Saudi princes doing gay stuff and not the kind where they’re waterboarding Jeffrey Epstein.
TL;DR Modoru Motoni might have been drawing this with one hand while holding a fat doobie in the other, but Kitty Media might have made a bong out of a barrel and smoked it through a gas mask to have licensed it. It does have some funny dialogue, but most of the jokes or gags either fall flat or are lost in translation. Overall it’s just a frustrating read because you never have any idea what’s going on, the art is bad and characters are annoying, it prefers to talk/joke about sex instead of actually showing it, and it has a weird tonal mixture of serious and silly that end up canceling each other out. It’s not even funny-bad really, it’s just bad.