Tag: classics

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KIREPAPA (Ryo Takagi) + OVA

When I first got into the world of bishounen buttsecks comics, I was looking around on online for recommendations and distinctly remember Kirepapa being on several people’s lists and referred to as some kind of scandalous age gap romance. It was already older by that time, having been done around 2003, but it got an OVA in 2008 and thus Deux Press licensed the manga. Whether it’s actually the manga or just the OVA they remember, the crowd who came of age with Junjo Romantica seemed to remember it fondly. I would have been the right age to be included in this group, but I didn’t really get into yaoi until later than most people. Before that I only watched anime or played video games and mostly imagined Fire Emblem characters hot anime guys naked but not with each other. The angel of yaoi hadn’t come to me and pointed me down the path of light yet. Wow, it’s so bright! Look at all the trees and clouds shaped like dicks! And all the unrealistically beautiful 2D men having hardcore sex! Waaaaaiiit a minute…are you really an angel? 

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LA ESPERANCA (Chigusa Kawai)

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!

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FAKE (Sanami Matoh) + OVA

Much how I feel about most ‘classics’ in literature, this is a series that I wanted to have read, but didn’t actually want to read. When it comes to yaoi, I usually feel this way about early 00s-era multi-volume 16+ series, like Gravitation. Whether or not Fake and Gravitation would be regarded as ‘shounen-ai classics’ (at least in the US market) is debatable – actually I don’t think the subgenre has been around long enough here, much less with any real visibility, for people to start throwing around that word yet. Still, they’re perhaps among the most well-known of the shounen-ai books, if only because they didn’t have a lot of competition back in 2003. More pontification on that after the jump.


The reason I shy away from these older multi-volume 16+ series is largely because 1) pacing issues/too much filler, which affect a lot of multi-volume series tbf 2) a large time commitment 3) nothing explicit 4) the drawing style either feels outdated or just isn’t up my alley. 5) They’re often mostly geared towards a teenage audience and not an adult one. I also think context needs some consideration, these series are a product of their time. 2003 was a year before you could easily pull up free manga/scanlations/porn on the internet, or actually, really anything on the internet, because you probably still had dial-up and your mom had to hang up the phone for you to log onto AIM. June wasn’t even around yet and you couldn’t exactly go down to the bookstore and buy anything resembling a Sakira title, and the LGBT community was less visible than it is today. Yaoi was pretty underground stuff, difficult to acquire and definitely not in English.

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