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Posts Tagged Boys’ Love/Yaoi

Review: Can’t Win With You! (Vol. 01) – eManga Edition

Reviewer: Jaime Samms

Author: Satosumi Takaguchi
Manga-ka: Yukine Honami
Publisher: eManga
Rating: Older Teen (16+)
Release Date: August 2007

Synopsis: “Yuuhi-kun planned to build a soccer field on the piece of mountain land that was his inheritance, but when his brother’s elite Shuuiku Academy needed a new campus, Yuuhi was forced to reconsider. Now he finds himself both the landlord, and a student at the school! Needless to say, the other students are none too happy about being shipped out to the boonies, so Yuuhi – AKA “chicken-head” – has become the object of their collective ire. But there’s something about the country bumpkin that has many students eyeing Yuuhi in a different way…a way that makes him very uncomfortable. Seems there’s a lot more than “book-learnin’” going on at this school, and Yuuhi’s about to get a whole ‘nuther kind of education!”

I used to think I was not a fan of the school boy stories, however, I keep reading them, so I guess I must see something in them after all. This one uses the typical excuse of a school full of hormonal boys to explain why they are constantly all over each other.

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PR: Animate USA – New Releases in Kindle

TOKYO, JAPAN – August 4 – Animate U.S.A., Inc. is pleased to reveal its August release lineup for the Amazon Kindle Store! Four more Yaoi titles published by Libre Publishing in Japan, including Kindle Exclusive title “Pet in Love – Pet on Duty Bonus Story-,” have been added to the Kindle Store.

For more information, please visit www.animate-world.com, www.b-boy.jp, and to keep on top of all things about Nitta Youka, nittayouka.com!!

August 2010:
Nase Yamato – “Pet in Love – Pet on Duty Bonus Story” Kindle Exclusive!!!
Youka Nitta – “Sound of My Voice – Golden Goose Part 2”
Shiuko Kano – “P.B.B. Play Boy Blues – Act 2”
Makoto Tateno – “See You in the School of the Muse Vol.1 (in Japanese)”

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SDCC: Mr. Clean! Mr. Clean! Tokyopop Adds New Titles

Apologies to any who now have a four word jingle stuck in their head and want to clean things with the aid of a brawny bald man. Here we are on Monday, meaning San Diego Comic Con is behind us for another year. Not as many announcements as people were hoping but still some fun new titles to look forward to. As I’m all behind on posting on them, we can look at it as a sort of extended SDCC 2010… right?

Tokyopop had its panel mid-weekend and offered up few new series for the masses:


Mr. Clean: Fully Equipped
Tōya Tobina


Pavane for a Dead Girl
Koge Donbo


Sakura no Ichiban
Yuna Kagesaki

The staff also went over the list of upcoming releases which you can read in its entirety over at AnimeNewsNetwork. After noticing an absence of a number of titles I was really looking forward (such as the newest volumes of Matsuri Akino’s series), I asked over Twitter and was promptly responded to by Tokyopop who assured me they were coming soon (with picture proof!). Now that’s service :)

Other tidbits of news included confirmation of the new Gakuen Heaven titles discovered on Amazon a few months ago ( Endo ~ Calling you & Shichijo ~ Sweet Sweet Darling) along with schedule updates for a few other BLU titles as well – “Baseball Heaven, due out 10/12/10, Stray Cat by Halco (11/9/10), Secretary’s Love by tohko Akiba (12/7/10), and You and Me, Etc. by Kyuugou (2/8/11)” (from ANN)

Tokyopop will also be releasing some jigsaw puzzles for their original properties (yay?), will be releasing more manga via digital means at $5.99 a book and shared some more details on a How To Draw Shoujo Manga book which will include material from Japanese company Hakusensha’s line-up including fan-favourites Ouran Host Club and Fruits Basket.


Review: Age Called Blue

Reviewer: Shannon Fay

Manga-ka: Est Em
Publisher: Netcomics
Rating: Older Teen (16+)
Release Date: October 2009

Synopsis: “Forbidden love has a way of intertwining itself with destiny. Nick and Billy share a dream to become rock stars, but the dream comes crashing down the night Nick steals Billy’s guitar and life savings to pay off a debt. The crime breaks down the barrier of friendship between the two boys, revealing a far deeper level of connection than either was willing to admit. However, other members of the band grow tired of Nick’s free-thinking and careless ways. They want the “hippie” out of the band, leaving Billy faced with a heart-wrenching decision. He can either sacrifice his music, a career into which he’s invested countless hours of sweat and blood. Or he can sacrifice the boy who stole his heart long ago…”

Age Called Blue doesn’t feel like a yaoi manga. Instead it feels like a comic that happens to have gay leads. While the focus is on the main characters’ relationship, it’s more complicated than them just being boyfriends. For Nick, Billy is all he has in the world, while for Billy, Nick is the only thing holding him back. The way the characters act is sadly realistic, making this a believable and interesting drama.

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Anime Expo 2010: Digital Manga

Anime Expo 2010 - Digital Manga

Anime Expo, North America’s largest anime convention, is upon us once again this weekend! The internet’s been buzzing with excitement from industry folk, bloggers, guests and attendees alike in the weeks leading up to it – and though I can only speak as a spectator to the spectators – it certainly feels like the excitement has reached a level greater than the decline of last year, which saw less industry-presence and fewer announcements.

The big manga news to start goes to Digital Manga who had their panel on Thursday evening. AnimeNewsNetwork is covering all the major events of the convention and thanks to them I’m able to offer the abridged version here for your curious eyes:

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Review: Fevered Kiss

Reviewer: Jaime Samms

Author: Arika Kuga
Manga-ka: Taishi Zaou
Publisher: DokiDoki
Rating: Older Teen (16+)
Release Date: November 2009

Synopsis: “On the night of the year-end party, in high spirits and under the influence of the party’s free-flowing alcohol, Satori ends up sleeping with Asou. Since then, every day that Asou comes over, he does nothing beyond kiss Satori over and over, and as much as it perplexes him, Satori is unable to resist his advances. But one day Satori hears a nasty rumor that Asou has a girlfriend!”

This is the first boys’ love novel I’ve read that isn’t a June publication, though it is published by another Digital Manga imprint, Doki Doki. I enjoyed it – for some reason, it had a different feel to the prose. It maybe sounded a little less like it had been translated from Japanese than the June novels tend to do, and a little more like the English you might expect from a native speaker. I don’t know that either style is necessary better, or even that I like one or the other better. They’re just different.

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PR: Animate USA Brings More Yaoi to Kindle in July

TOKYO, JAPAN – July 1 – Animate U.S.A., Inc. is pleased to reveal its July release lineup for the Amazon Kindle Store! Five more Yaoi titles published by Libre Publishing in Japan, including one Japanese-text manga by Youka Nitta, are now available!

For more information, visit these websites, www.animate-world.com, www.b-boy.jp, and to keep on top of all things about Nitta Youka, nittayouka.com!!

July 2010:

Youka Nitta – “Sound Of My Voice – Golden Goose Part 1”
Youka Nitta – “LOL Theater”
Youka Nitta – “Embracing Love Vol.14 (Japanese)”
Shiuko Kano – “P.B.B. Play Boy Blues – Part 1”
Natsuho Shino – “Oh my god! Vol.2”

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Manga Mortality Paints Bleak Picture at Media Blasters

Word comes from Robert’s Anime Corner Blog that Media Blasters has “indefinitely removed” from their schedule three upcoming manga releases – Gay’s Anatomy Episode 0, Drawn to Him (both boys’ love titles) and the sixth volume of Akihibara. (Thanks to Tina Anderson who initially posted the news on her Twitter account)

Schedules being pushed back and books being postponed is a fairly common occurence but outright cancellations aren’t as often, and rarely ever as upfront. So what does this mean for Media Blasters’ manga divison?

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Scanlation Sentiments: My Answers to Your Statements

The recent press release regarding the manga coalition, which saw a slew of companies finally banding together to battle the evil that is manga aggregator sites, was met with the excepted amount of drama, assumption and protest. While the number of fans cheering the decision and understanding the positive implications of it came out in healthy force, the nay-sayers remained as always the prevalently loudest.

With the resulting week or so of virtual fandom butt-hurt across various forums and sites, I was finally compelled to finish my rough manifesto of why so many of those arguments are completely nutso. Some are sympathizable, many are wildly shared and all have been corrected a hundred times long before I decided to step into the ring of legality and logic. But, to try and take the edge off that voice in my head that constantly screams ‘do they even know what the heck they’re talking about?!’, I’ve conglomerated my brain-responses to hundreds of people’s emotionally-charged internet responses into one post of fairly-frank, honest and thus likely offensive-to-those-who-take-it-all-as-personally responses to those statements you never meant to be taken as a question.

And here we go…
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Review: Maniac Shorts Shot

Reviewer: Shannon Fay

Manga-ka: Miya Ousaka
Publisher: 801Media
Rating: Mature (18+)
Release Date: April 2010

Synopsis: “Design school students Issei and Jin, on their way home from a live concert, pick up a discarded cardboard box, only to find that it contains a pair of sexy underwear with a “special” attachment…!! Deciding to have some fun, Issei puts them on and poses for Jin, but when Jin finds when he aims his camera at Issei, his sexual desire goes through the roof!! What will happen when Jin finds he can’t hold back anymore and has to have Issei right then and there?!”

Maniac Shorts Shot is a good example of how varied yaoi anthologies can be when it comes to explicitness. The first story in the book really makes the manga earn its 18+ rating with its frequent and explicit sex scenes – in fact, it’s not so much there are a lot of sex scenes, it’s more like the whole story is a sex scene with some plot duct taping them together. On the other hand, the next story is a sweet love story with a relatively vanilla sex scene. It’s weird to see such different stories in the same book, but on their own merits each story works.

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