I am slowly – so very slowly – making my way through this pile of Yaoi Press titles that has been sitting around for ages – someone gave them to me free, and now I can see why. The thought of reading the rest of these is akin to slogging back to work at 8am on a Monday after a great weekend, but it has to be done. For posterity, you know? They’re the yaoi equivalents of the forgotten schlocky VHS B-movies someone unearths outside a Goodwill that end up on Red Letter Media – except they haven’t been forgotten just yet. They will though. Let 20 years or so pass, and they’ll age like fine wine for the bad OEL manga connoisseur. So, person from the post-apocalyptic future who just found a tattered copy of Xorcisms and Pogo Sticks also by YP in some bombed out basement while foraging for expired Campbell’s tins and then dusted off the ancient internet archives using the government-issued chip in their head to see where this curious paper relic full of badly-drawn dicks came from and it led you to here to this website, well ha ha ha mister I totally predicted this already, and get out of my bomb shelter you future intruder. And don’t touch that lever! Ha, just kidding, my bomb shelter would have way better reading material – useful, serious, and contemplative tomes for humanity’s uncertain future such as Dick Fight Island, Gay’s Anatomy and Long & Hard! My Brother’s Cute Gay Classmate Fucked My Ass So Hard We Both Turned into Sentient Sex Robots In Another World Where Everyone Has 17 Nuclear-Powered Mega Dicks?! (You caught me, this one doesn’t exist yet, but I believe in the yaoi isekai future).
Warning: very NSFW images after the jump
So today we have the thoughtfully titled “Yaoi Hentai.” OEL yaoi usually has one positive right off the bat – uncensored peen!! That counts for something in my book, even if most of the weenies are just outlines, don’t expect any Da Vinci dicks here. I should state upfront that I only vols 2 and 4, so only half of them, but it doesn’t really matter since they are episodic (and have different artists). I’m not sure if it’s possible to read all four at once without losing a couple IQ points so perhaps I unknowingly dodged a bullet. If I do happen to come across vols. 1 and 3 or someone out there is horrible enough to send them to me, I will update this review.
So in vol 2, we start off with a story about a beautiful man who’s trapped inside a violin like a genie, and if you play it, he comes out naked like a birthday cake stripper, and – because this is yaoi – has sex with you. When the current owner takes his violin to a repair shop, the restorer discovers the secret. Oh, and also fucks him. Even though he has been bound to this violin by a jilted lover ‘long ago,’ he’s still young, but I guess he’s not really a ghost because you can fuck him? Which people do of course, and lucky for us, they happen to also be young attractive guys (what are the odds!). Fun idea but overall your standard subpar YP fare here, but at least we can confirm there are indeed uncensored dicks in the house.
For some reason they thought this would be a great spot to put….only the second half of another story that isn’t even in this book? It’s just a couple pages of badly drawn sex scenes, but when you get to the end they have an ad for said story, and it is its own book called Pinned, and it looks like it’s about wrestlers, which I guess would explain the hilarious anatomy of the characters here:
As for why they would release an entire book for that story but leave this chapter out, only to randomly stick it in an anthology later on, I have no idea – was Pinned an NYT bestseller in a parallel universe and they felt obliged to write a follow-up scene years after it was published? – but for the people that read Pinned (oh God, the people that bought it), surprise! Looks like there was a 15-page sex scene you guys got cheated out of. 😈
Story #3 – put your lap bar down, the ride starts here. Think sci-fi buttrape orgies with tentacles. This long story is the meat of the book and stars Morjan, who lives on a planet called Kordeth that has been banned from an interplanetary trade union because his grandfather refused to kiss the sexually depraved emperor Lyvidian on the lips.
Morjan idolizes Lyvidian – who is seemingly modeled after an 80s hair metal reject – and when he turns 18 he decides to visit him on his planet where everyone walks around with their dicks out all the time, to do ‘sexual penance’ to have the sanctions lifted.
This ‘penance’ involves buttrape with a fruit, tentacle rape by a monster named Gorgath in front of an arena of spectators followed by gang rape, S&M with an old fat man, and then finally getting raped by Lyvidian himself – although by that point I’m sure his asshole looks like throwing a hotdog down a hallway so he probably didn’t feel it one bit.
Lyvidian decides not to subject him to the last ‘trial’ though, and likes Morjan so much he offers to keep him as his sex slave in exchange for lifting the sanctions on Kordeth. Well, I guess it was a happy ending?
I’ll just say what everyone is thinking: don’t tell me that this isn’t the Thor Ragnarok porn parody that we deserve, because it totally is.
Although the art had that sort of amateur wannabe manga look and some definite rough spots, clearly a very ambitious attempt was made here, so good for the artist since actually doing it even when you’re not amazing yet is the best way to improve. Not that I could do better, I’m just some chick with a dumb blog, so what the fuck do I know. No but really, it was very entertaining, and I can totally get past some unpolished art for a story this wild. There’s also, like, a LOT of dicks in this story. I actually counted them and got 83 plus 1/2 dicks (the half one because it was really far away and not fully rendered), and 22 assholes either with or without something in them – so if nothing else, they aimed for quantity over quality. If it was longer, they’d probably have a shot at whatever the record for Most Amount of Dicks in a Yaoi is. Not to take away from those mildly impressive numbers, but for the most part, they’re so un-detailed that they might as well be censored anyway. The writer and artist were two different people, the writer going by the name ‘Moon Yen, ’ who also did the first story. I don’t know who this Moon Yen is (probably a guest collaborator) but I’m pretty sure I want to find their fanfiction.net or AO3 account. The story wasn’t exactly creative, it was just a bad scifi porn plot with some token “hentai” extras, but the writer has a fucking depraved imagination. I also think it may have the most rape of any yaoi I’ve ever read, so if they have awards for that, Moon Yen is probably somewhere on the leaderboards. Congratulations?
Following this penile magnum opus is a short and rather forgettable musician hookup story with art that largely looks traced from manga or other source material. It does have an anatomy panel which I’ll leave here for further contemplation though:
Wrapping up this second volume was a surprise gem of a comedy story called ‘Trach the Tentacle Monster;’ I guess this was the second episode of it. It’s about a sentient tentacle monster that’s reading a porn magazine and sees a bio of a porn star who claims he wants to be raped by a tentacle monster, and goes and does just that.
I’ll give it to Yamila Abraham (the founder of YP and writer of this one), this idea is genuinely funny, and she did a good job with it. I’m not sure how popular yaoi tentacle rape is in terms of actual serious fujo fap material or if it’s mainly just a ‘oh, those wacky Japanese’ meme and people get a kick out of it (I’m guessing the latter), but the parody was on-point and I would totally read a volume of just this premise.
Oh shit! Look what’s on the back of vol 4! Guess I have one thing to look forward to…
VOL 4 (and Knuckles)
So I guess we’ll just plow right into it (is that a buttsex pun? Maybe? Half a pun?) Vol. 4 leads with a surprise – get ready for it – an actual not-terrible PWP with decent art. In a Yaoi Press book! I know! I mean, to call it a ‘story’ would imply there was a plot, but with a title like ‘Yaoi Hentai’ it’s not like anyone was expecting Charles Dickens here. It’s called ‘Desert Longing’ and it was mainly just – yaoi sex with an Arabian setting where all you can really infer about what’s happening is that one character is a slave and the other isn’t, because thankfully they stripped out pointless filler like dialogue and, actually, names of the characters.
It’s short, but about 3/4th of it is just sex and then it just ends after they both cum. My kind of story! Who are these heroes without capes? The art was done by someone named M.A. Sambre, who can clearly actually draw (not always a given in YP books). They didn’t neglect the shading either and put some effort into the details and backgrounds. Whatever M.A. Sambre is doing now, they have talent for porn art and I hope they’re still drawing it (I’m too lazy to google any of these people right now, sorry). Is Yaoi Press moving up in the caliber of work they publish or is this a fluke? Stay tuned…
Guess we’ll just plunge right into this next one (Hope you’re not sick of my bad butt puns yet, because there’s more) This one was definitely memorable, and I’m not sure if it was in a good or a bad way. It felt like standing at crosswalk when suddenly a parade unexpectedly crosses in front of you… ‘huh? What’s going on?’ and then just boisterous and confusing noise and motion for about 5-10 minutes while you try to take everything in, until it passes. If you’ve seen the Satoshi Kon movie Paprika it’s kind of like that fever dream parade.
It was a military-themed story – I think? – that also involves rape of a native person? And vice versa? Actually I’m not sure what the heck it was I read, it sure was something, but most of the time had no idea what was going on in the flow of this story because it was so jarring and every single drawn line seemed like it was fighting for attention simultaneously. It was by someone named Donna Barr, notable for having a clearly unique and bold artstyle that kind of looked inspired by woodcut, but more notably for this particular book it doesn’t straight-up rip off manga for a change. It has a kind of ‘early digital art’ feel to it that I find charming (bit of a weird word to describe a story about military group sex and rape, but oh well). When this book was published, digital drawing techniques and software were still very much developing, and tablets weren’t a widespread thing yet. It looks like she may have done this in a vector-based program like Illustrator with just a mouse, which would have taken for fucking ever – so if you’re out there reading this Donna, I admire your dedication to their craft of porn comics.
The next story, ‘Forbidden Magic,’ was pretty blah in just about every way, but also had the misfortune of being sandwiched between two much more interesting stories. I do like darker-skinned characters in yaoi, but the other character just looked too much like a 12 year old girl with a penis – some people’s cup of tea, maybe, but not mine.
Like I hinted, following this is something more intriguing. Called ‘not expecting u,’ it’s clearly the odd one out in like, every single way – for one it’s not a yaoi, it’s bara, and it was clearly done by someone who can actually draw (credited as ‘Hokane’) with a style much more influenced by western comics than Japanese manga. I’m not sure what it’s doing in this book, it’s extremely out of place because it’s kind of on another level both quality- and content-wise, and my shitty phone pics don’t really do it justice. It stars Marcos and José, two muscly former school lovers who reunite after 11 years and immediately get to making up for lost time. With their dicks, of course.
Despite how you feel about bara it’s hard not to objectively say it’s, like, clearly the best one in here. It’s actually somewhat sad and emotional too when they aren’t railing each other, which I wasn’t prepared for. I’m really glad that it was included because I have never seen YP publish a story like this, and it shows they really started to think beyond the manga-copycat aesthetic in OEL BL. It has an odd ‘fuzz’ to the linework though, like it’s lower resolution – or perhaps it’s that it was originally in color. The art strongly reminded me of a (western) gay graphic novel I had called ‘Side by Side’ that’s now quite rare, I actually googled it to see if it was by the same artist (it wasn’t, unless ‘Hokane’ and ‘Mioki’ are the same person). Note to self, I need to read more of this artist’s work, they are very good at what they do. Another happy surprise in this book!
We’re almost there, last one folks! Finally, what I’ve been waiting for, another installment of “Trach!” Omg, this was even better than the last one. We start off with that kid of a very sus age on the back getting Trach’d if you will:
I guess I wasn’t the only one to think this…
So I guess they have a bunch of tentacle monsters in a lab that they want to use to impregnate lesbians (is this how monster girls are born?) but they test them beforehand to make sure they’re not too rough on them. The rough ones get to do the gay stuff. Trach passes with flying colors of course; he’s a very talented rapist with a bright future and all….(I felt disgusting typing that)
Well, that wraps it up (get it?!?) I made it through two of these, and still have both my eyeballs. I think I might need to make my brain go on a diet after all the junk food I just gave it. You hear that, brain? It’s church and philosophy books for you for a week until you forget everything you just read.
I think it’s clear that Vol 4 was superior to vol 2 in many ways. The quality of the work was clearly improved, in fact collectively I think it’s the best art I’ve seen in a YP title so far (it’s also the only one so far that I have rated above a 5). By this time they were more established and had published three previous anthologies in the Yaoi Hentai series and perhaps could get better artists interested (curious to know if they paid the artists for the work upfront or if it was like a ‘get free exposure’ thing, or maybe they just got a cut of sales?) Something else annoying about vol 2 was that it was full of ads for their other books, right between the chapters. They already have a tendency to pad their releases with previews and bonus stories, so with the addition of shameless advertising, vol 2 felt like 1/5 junk content.
Additionally, most sex scenes in vol 2 became instantly and unintentionally comedic due to basic drawing issues, which is true for a lot of stuff that YP has published. Because of this – and I’ve mentioned this before in other reviews of them – comedy is often where they shine. It’s only when these artists stop taking themselves so seriously and trying desperately to be ‘real manga, like, you know, from Japan!’ that their work is enjoyable to me, because then the bad art complements the humor and the writers involved do actually have funny story ideas although Y.A.’s own ‘Trach’ has been the best so far (I also didn’t hate Zesty, for the record). As for the non-comedic stories they’ve publish, most of the time aren’t bad ideas, but this would be a prime example of how ‘bad execution’ can really sink a boat.
Both of these anthologies lack any discernible theme, unless ‘guys fucking’ counts as one. It seems they just threw together whatever they could get, no matter how random. At the very least, in vol 4, they began to feature artists with more diverse styles rather than just manga copycats. This is a double-edged sword for them: the Japanese manga “style” is popular and sells in the west, but marketing OEL boys love as “yaoi” (obviously to reach the existing genre fans), usually just comes off as western artists copying the Japanese, even though some of the art and stories are good. I neither care nor discriminate if BL has eastern or western origin if it’s well-written with good art, but there are purists out there for sure who won’t touch an OEL no matter how good it is, and when it’s a clear stylistic copycat it only gives them more reason to do so. I wonder if dropping the ‘yaoi’ in both their publisher and title names and going with the more general ‘boys love’ descriptor would have helped; perhaps that’s occurred to them in the past. Nowdays western BL is commonplace and artists more readily and more confidently develop their own styles that aren’t carbon copies of Japanese manga, which is a good thing – and the term ‘yaoi’ has become more ok of an adjective to describe western BL because it’s just so intertwined with the genre, even though the aforementioned purists may turn up their noses at that thought.
Even though these books are funny and a bit cringey now, they may have sold well back then. In 2008 there was less actual yaoi in English to compete with, not to mention a much less robust digital art community as a whole. I mean, I guess they at least sold well enough for Yaoi Press to still be around – unless this publisher is more of a passion project of Yamila Abraham and less a money-making endeavor, possibly even a money-losing endeavor propped up by a dead relative’s inheritance, as I have jokingly conjectured in the past (but only half-jokingly).
Almost to the bottom of the Yaoi Press pile! 2 more to go! I can see the light at the end of the tunnel…
TL;DR: There is one story where I counted 83.5 dicks so obviously that’s really all you need to know, but this was a long review though so I guess I need more than one sentence… These are anthologies of various OEL yaoi comics that vary widely in quality. Besides ample uncensored dicks, balls, and all manner of bussy, additional highlights include a legitimately good surprise bara story and a parody series about tentacle rape starring “Trach the tentacle monster” which is legitimate comedy gold. Vol 4 was definitely an improvement from vol 2, where they had a noticeable uptick in the quality of the stories and the art, seems like Yaoi Press is finally plugging some holes (heh) in their content quality sieve.
Yaoi Hentai Volume 4 has also been selected for a dubious honor – the only Yaoi Press title to join my permanent collection (so far, anyway). I also legitimately think this one will be worth money one day, although I would never sell smut this great, so I guess my grandchildren can just find it and be traumatized for life. Merry Christmas, you filthy book.
