Yaoi manga reviews and fujoshi ramblings
All signs pointed to me liking this story – historical setting, feisty rich boy uke falling for mysterious dashing thief, Honami art. But even with tasty ingredients the final product turned out to be a bit disappointing, similar to every experience I’ve ever had with baking brownies. Now I just give up beforehand and eat the batter raw like God intended…
Continue reading “STOLEN HEART (Honami/Kanamaru)”
In terms of BL comedies we have in English, there are precious few laugh-out-loud gems. This one might have flown under the radar (!) a bit as it aged because the art is kind of bad, but the rest is so great that it honestly doesn’t matter – particularly if you, like me, never grew out of dick and butt jokes being riotously funny. So buckle your seatbelts, put your phones on airplane mode, and let’s jam this cockpit wide open because this is an A.N.A.L. hijacking. Aw wait, shit, should have remembered the warning:
This is my second Kuwabara title after Blue Sky, and her first BL. I looked back what I wrote about Blue Sky and turns out it was pretty similar to what I thought about this title too: nice art, boring, generic, but not unenjoyable overall. It’s a chocolate chip cookie – safe, simple, sweet.
Continue reading “ALCOHOL, SHIRT, AND KISS (Yuko Kuwabara)”
This was one of the first BL I ever had in my collection and at the time it was kind of rare. It’s still not all that common but when collecting old BL the general rule of thumb is that the ‘rare stuff is usually good stuff.’
Let me just say that this rule does NOT apply here…
Continue reading “LIVE FOR LOVE (Jun Mayama)”
This is probably one of the worst-looking copies of a BL book I have, the inner cover is literally held together by tape and it has suspicious-looking stains on some of the inner pages that look kind of like cum. I think of it as an added bonus feature to make the stories more realistic 🙃
But really, this was a pretty decent BL with three good stories, so you can always judge a book by its suspicious-looking stains that look like jizz, as the saying goes.
Continue reading “RESTART (Shouko Hidaka)”
This book is like a bad Chinese buffet, except with sex – there’s a whole lot of it, but none of it makes you go ‘yum!’, and you don’t really want seconds. Also you may have just eaten fried dog in that chef’s special.
Continue reading “HANKY PANKY (Koreaki Kamuro)”
I literally reviewed about 20 old forgotten June titles in a row in the past couple months, so it’s time to read some other imprints for a change (June just happens to have the largest back catalog of yaoi published in English by miles, which is why I always seem to be reading their stuff). Let’s pick one from the vault of the current top dog in BL publishing – SuBLime!
Shockingly, this is the very first SuBLime title I’ve talked about on this blog, (mainly because I usually talk about older or sucky titles and they have neither), so I thought I should start with one of their first ones, Honey Darling from 2012. This is a fan favorite with enduring popularity, in fact just yesterday I let a fujo I was selling some stuff to online pick a free BL from my box of 20 or so doubles and she immediately and enthusiastically chose Honey Darling (over much newer titles like Twilight out of Focus and even Dick Fight Island, mind you).
Continue reading “HONEY DARLING (Norikazu Akira)”
I have a whole lot of June books, and I’m trying to weed some of the crap out of my collection. But the last three I’ve picked have just made the cut to stay out of the sell pile just by a hair, mainly because they have passable art and a decent amount of sex. Really, that’s all it takes, I’m an easy customer!
Continue reading “THE DAWN OF LOVE (Kazuho Hirokawa)”
It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed a Naduki Koujima title, the last one was Naughty but Nice which was another of her early works like this one. Our Kingdom is one of her most well-known manga despite being sort of incomplete, and it embodies all the things you can usually find in her work – school settings, rapey semes, cute little big-eyed ukes, and uncomfortable power-imbalanced relationships between them. Oh yeah, and crotch grabbing and forceful handjobs. She really, really loves crotch grabbing and forceful handjobs…
Continue reading “OUR KINGDOM (Naduki Koujima)”
The back of the books calls this ‘one of the hottest, silliest yaoi manga ever written!’ Well me set the record straight right now, this has about as much truth to it as Epstein having killed himself. Not that most people actually take the marketing lines on book covers with anything but a grain of salt, but I’m seriously doubtful that whoever wrote that actually read this because it should, without a doubt, have a little official-looking seal somewhere on the cover that says ‘Certified Crap.’ I mean, that would probably only appeal to people like me who think it’s fun to play on the garbage pile, but least it wouldn’t be false advertising.
Continue reading “PART-TIME PETS (Reno Amagi)”