Just A...Quick Lick?

 

Saya Namekawa, bullied by some of the other girls in her middle school, has resolved over the summer to become a badass delinquent that nobody will mess with.  Resolved to, sure, but she still hasn't quite gotten the hang of it.  Sure, she does talk in a 4Kids-dubbed Joey Wheeler tough guy accent (no doubt a speech pattern hard-translated from the Japanese), but she's always trying (and failing) to act like a delinquent to get people's attention, however positive or negative that may be.

 

Whatever side of the spectrum it falls on, this new persona puts her at odds with the serious-minded class rep Tojo.  Funnily enough, however, Tojo not-so-subtly hides a distinctly perverted side that seems to only come out around Namekawa.

 

This leads to our heroine ending nearly every short chapter being comically molested and licked all over by Tojo, one way or another.  (All kept PG-13, for better or for worse.  Not even any undie-flashes or shirt-lifting!  But at least the vagueness is there, so us pervs can theoretically imagine anything we like.)

 

The series is basically a very readable fusion of the Japanese-style humor that I have mentioned once or twice already on this blog, as well as tasteful ecchi.  There’s almost no story; it’s a gag manga.  I will say that would probably work against it for any serious readers hoping to get invested.

 

Another interesting thing about Namekawa-san Won’t Take A Licking is that our two protagonists’ antics also seem to awaken lesbianism in many passersby who happen to witness them together, most notably a pair of visiting underclassmen girls and Namekawa’s other friend, the pet-keeper Inukai, who quickly gains a desire to add Namekawa to her collection.

 

That is, cage her up, teach her tricks and order her around.

 

So there's likely going to be escalating levels of both silliness and perviness.  Fingers crossed.

 

Don't Let The Name Fool You

 

 

Yes, dear readers, Shuzo Oshimi, the master of pervy, adolescent hormone-addled psychological horror, the man behind Flowers of Evil, Inside Mari and Happiness (the vampire manga) is at it again.

 

(Though, thankfully, this time, despite its title, he has not yet gone and warped Alice In Wonderland...yet...)

 

Long story short, the bespectacled Yo is crushing on Yui.  Also in the mix is popular boy Kei.  Given that this is an Oshimi manga, it should come as a surprise to no one that Kei teaches Yo how to masturbate (albeit thankfully not in graphic, depicted detail).  Yo later witnesses Yui confessing her love to Kei, as well as a kiss.  This triggers one of the few lust-induced nosebleeds I’ve seen in a manga that was not played for comedy.  Then Kei suddenly moves away to Hokkaido soon after, without any warning.  Years later, our protagonists are now in high school, although Yo and Yui’s relationship has become strained.  He still wants to date her, though.  On the day of first entry, a new girl appears in class who uses male honorifics and talks crudely, who hits on Yo.  It is then revealed that this new girl is their old friend Kei, returned to their hometown apparently “done with being a guy”.  There is also a scene where Kei kisses Yo in the (male) bathroom and Yo runs away.

 

The flirtatious Kei invites Yo over to her house (where she lives alone) in order to help her unpack.  Yui is also invited to this little “reunion party”, though she does openly lament the loss of the male Kei that she kissed those few years ago.  This does not turn out to be a deterrent to Kei kissing her again.  Yo promptly breaks it up and Yui runs off after Kei now turns her attention to Yo and kisses him.  The volume ends with Yo running out of the house after Yui.

 

Well, technically that’s a lie: the story of the volume ends there, but we are also treated to a brief autobiographical omake, wherein Oshimi tells us the story of his own sexual awakening and his own concepts of manliness and what it means to be a man.

 

I will admit, I had initially only picked up the title because not only were there slim pickings on my local B&N shelves, but also because it had "Alice" in the title.  (My own hang-ups and masochistic self-sabotage after the Tim Burton live-action disaster being a subject for another time.) 

I have said before that I support the rights of everyone to find love and to be who they are, and I stand by that.  And at least this is a relatively-positive (by some definition of the word) exposure of the transgender/agender/genderfluid/something-or-other experience and lifestyle.

(Actually, as of Vol. 1, Kei only says that he is "done being a guy, but is not necessarily interested in being a girl", whatever the glittery hell that means.  But I support his decisions and his rights to be so; but I just hope that it doesn't all come to a too-horrific end for any of them.)

Wish It Was Invisible

 

If you’re like me, then you use a Samsung Android phone.  And that means that your Google page when you first go on the internet immediately bombards you with ads or with the news of the day.  For a short while, back in the early months of 2022, the top article on my home page was always an invitation from Shonen Jump to look at a free preview of their apparent “new hit” Kubo Won’t Let Me Be Invisible.

 

I did read this first preview chapter, and found it to be nothing worth writing home about.  But then I saw the first physical copies of Volume One available at my local Barnes and Noble, so I figured I would take a look.

 

Sadly, my opinion did not change.

 

Long story short, Junta Shiraishi is basically invisible to everyone at his school.  Other students sit on him and he must work hard to make sure that the teacher (who oddly resembles Ochanomizu from Astro Boy) does not mark him absent by mistake.  The only one who ever seems to notice him is classmate Nagisa Kubo (for plot reasons).

 

The series itself has very average artwork and mild amounts of comedy, but is also deadly boring.  Funnily enough, the first volume includes a translated version of the original pilot chapter that was submitted to Shonen Jump in the first place, and it somehow feels worlds better than the actual finished product that we wound up getting.

 

One small thing that seperates Kubo Won’t Let Me Be Invisible from something like Teasing Master Takagi-san or Komi Can’t Communicate or something like that is that not only does Shiraishi have a baby brother named Seita, but Kubo also has an older sister named Akina.

 

And that’s it.

 

Finally, I should say that even the title of the work seems a bit misleading.  As I see it, the title seems to be saying (or at least implying) that Shiraishi actively wants to remain invisible, but the troublesome Kubo just will not leave him in peace.  She will not allow him to just sit there stewing and wasting his life away.  (This is clearly not the case; Nagisa is a funny-ish character who’s trying to break Shiraishi out of his shell, but there’s nowhere near as much drama as my first interpretation of the title would have led me to believe.)

 

My advice to you, dear readers, is to pretend that this series is invisible.

 

Sasaki And Miyano And Me

 

 

Let me get this out of the way: I am aware of BL and gay rights and all that.  I am “woke”, in the proper sense of the term, in that I do my best to be open-minded and tolerant and understanding of all innocent people who have never done anything to me or other innocent people and are just trying to live their lives.

 

That being said, I am not much for yaoi or BL (boys love).  I am 100% straight, but I do find titillation in sexuality of all kinds.

 

But the other day (literally, the other day), I found a copy of Sasaki and Miyano Volume One.  (And, I believe, it has also recently gotten an anime, if anyone’s interested.)

 

The reason I talk about BL is not only because the series is a BL, but also because a lot of the story and humor derive from the whole BL phenomenon.

 

Cute underclassman Miyano, the BL fudanshi (male fanboy perv, as opposed to fujoshi, the female fangirl perv) just happens one day to witness a bullying incident.  He is right in the middle of calling for help when delinquent upperclassman Sasaki tells him that [Sasaki] is going in to break them up.  Three months later, the two of them are on their way to developing a potentially-more-than-friends relationship.

 

The art for this series is good, especially the eyes on Miyano, plus each main character introduced in Vol. 1 is different enough from all of the others that I can tell them apart easily.  That being said, one can easily mistake it for a 4-koma gag-a-day comic from the formatting, which may turn some readers off.  Also, the wordings and speech balloon placement can, at times, make it hard to keep of who exactly is saying what to who at any given time.

 

A lot of the humor comes from the unintended cringe of Sasaki casually saying something about BL (his own fascination with which Miyano is trying to keep on the down-low, the “BL DL”, if you were) and Miyano frantically trying to shush him.  But there is also slapstick and traditional “Japanese humor” (as I call it) involved, so there is some variety.

 

Sasaki is just dumb and lazy enough to carry the odd joke here and there, and Miyano has definitely got the whole “cute but self-conscious about it” thing going on.  Together their antics almost make me smile.

 

And, while Sasaki does at times struggling to understand exactly what his new feelings for Miyano are, it is always treated with respect.  There is no homophobic bullying (at least in Vol. 1) and nobody finds this possible attraction to be odd or off-putting at all, save for possibly Miyano.  It is played as a gentle, heartfelt introspection.  And major points for showing/mentioning actual girls as well, rather than keeping the series all-male as some yuri/yaoi series are wont to do (even if the story does take place at an all-boys school).

 

It's an ordinary falling-in-love slice-of-life manga that just happens to have LGBT+ protagonists, that's all.  The feelings are what's important, and they are carried off quite well.

I could probably compare it to Kase-San and Morning Glories, a similar yuri manga I read a couple of years aback, albeit with boys instead of girls and working the jock angle rather than the fudanshi angle.  I also don’t seem to recall Kase-San and Morning Glories to be all that funny.

 

But they are both cute, innocent slice-of-life manga with LGBT+ protagonists, so that’s something, right?

 

PS: I also wound up going to the bookstore the other day, so I do have a list of other manga that I am meaning to read ASAP and then review for you, so stay tuned!

 

Another Alice, Another Wonderland

 

 

Ryohei Arisu is a disillusioned slacker stuck living in the shadow of his perfect little brother.  The sadness of everyday life surrounds him and his future does not look bright.  Until one night, when a massive and unusual fireworks display transports him and his two friends into a strange new world, a world where deadly games are played both for great prizes and for the right to continue living for another day. 

 

This manga series initially released in the US as a live-action Netflix series.  I tried to get into it, but who has the time or the patience these days to sit around and watch a 45-minute episode, let alone multiple ones in a row?  Plus I watched it in the English dub with subtitles, and that always gets me messed up, thinking about the minute differences between what the dub says and what they actually say.

 

Me, I preferred the manga, in case it wasn’t obvious.  With a manga, one can take one’s time reading it-not that I did much of that with how cerebral, fast-paced and action-packed it was.

 

The games are really think-y and would be almost impossible for anyone without a ton of lateral thinking and strategic ability.  Nothing about where the players are or who brought them there is explained, which serves as an excellent hook for people to keep reading.  We even get a brief scene of some fanservice from female player Shibuki.

 

Me, I have already some familiarity with author Aso Haro’s work from an earlier series known as Hyde and Closer (which I would also highly recommend), but this one is a lot more grown-up and even darker than his first one (if you can believe it).

 

And, yes: there is a vague “Alice In Wonderland” theme running through the work (if the main title wasn’t enough of a hint for you).  Hints and clues and in-game information pages are based on classic playing cards, and we have already seen characters named Chishiya (Cheshire Cat), Arisu (Alice) and Usagi (Rabbit, as in White Rabbit).  Some people may find that annoying, preferring to stick mainly and/or only to original work, but as long as it sticks to only sneaky little side references like those, I am not complaining.

 

The characters also manage to show a lot of themselves (or at least have the implied potential to), and the same goes with growing as people.  With his life on the line in games involving serial killers and flaming arrows, Arisu finds within himself a desire to live.

 

Would that we were all so lucky…