When a Character Disappointingly Changes: Akihito in Finder

On Votaries, I write about how a specific set of illustrations can form the audience's view of a character. I also write about feeling betrayed by an author re: changing a character. 

Both issues express my reaction to the later volumes of Finder by Ayano Yamane. 

Finder was one of the first yaoi series I began reading. It's Rider Haggard meets BDSM and, for the first few volumes, mucho fun. A total fantasy! And the characters, Asame and Akihito, were originally quite distinct. Asame was the manga-version of a yakuza (see Dangerous Convenience Store for a more bittersweet take) while Akihito was the reporter/everyman who becomes his lover. 

Up through Volume 8, I was along for the ride. I'm less enthusiastic now.

First, the plot kind of went off the rails, leading, currently, to an amnesia plot. In truth, I once came up with an amnesia plot of my own for the series. I'm not too fond of the current version because what I wanted to see was Akihito returned to his regular life with Asami watching him from the shadows. Would Akihito still find his way back to Asami, despite his "hey, I'm just a normal guy who takes risks" photographer shenanigans? 

That's not what is happening. Instead, it is international villains and bombings and Stockholm Syndrome or something, blah blah blah. 

That is, Akihito is no longer that touchstone for everyday life. He's Mr. Victim or Mr. To-Be-Rescued.

Volume 9

Around the same time, Akihito suddenly got MUCH younger in appearance (and not in a funny chibi way). 

Now, I'm not one who criticizes manga series with child-looking adult heroes. Such illustrations are a form, a language. They have their own purpose.

Volume 6

But one thing I liked about Akihito, as well as his snark and his everyman morality, was his rangy, twenty-something build and face. 

Asami is in his early thirties (I believe that within the universe of Finder, they are both now about a year older than when the series started). The age-gap was wide-enough. Akihito didn't need to look any younger. 

I wonder if I'm the only one to complain--in the latest volume (which, yes, I purchased; I'm just no longer "collecting" the series), the color insert provides the older version of Akihito. 

Again, it isn't the underlying politics or social implications that bother me. It is that Akihito was a certain way, and I liked him that way. 

Now--he isn't Akihito anymore. Not as much, anyway. (There's a separate issue here about when characters undergo necessary change through growth--which I will address at a later time.)

What Makes This Manga Different Than Others: Titan's Bride

On Votaries, I discuss tiny people: The Littles, the Borrowers, and Gnomes. In part, what enchants readers about tiny people is that they are living lives separate from humans. They have their own homes and social orders.

What happens if the worlds combine? Tolkien combined them and gives us friendships between elves and dwarves--as well as dwarves and hobbits. What about marriages? 

Jackson made the attempt, and I've argue that it worked, but it was fated to end.

What is impressive about Titan's Bride, story and art by ITKZ, is that the Titan falls happily in love with a halfling, the marriage is a success, and it looks right!

The halfling is Kouichi, a human, who on Earth is over 6 feet (and played basketball in high school). 

The Titan is a giant. The difference is somewhat more than the difference used in Cherryh's Foreigner series. In that series, Cameron, the protagonist, is also over 6 feet, being 6'2" or more. Yet, he is the height of a tall pubescent Atevi teen boy (and the same height as the small, powerful Atevi grandmother). 

Kouichi is the same height as a Titan 10-year-old. 

It isn't the easiest difference to sell since one can't help but react to the height difference. A short woman at 5'1", I get seriously unnerved when I face an adult shorter than me (it does happen!). But I never react that way with an actual child. The brain distinguishes the difference--sometimes, it has to play catch-up. 

Yet Titan's Bride offers art--which I frankly do not recommend to people who are squeamish about honestly drawn body parts (the series is erotica though not porn)--that manages to sell the relationship as that between two adults.

I have also, so far, been impressed by the internal conflict: Kouichi and Caius quickly come to love each other. Their physical differences aren't the problem (though, interestingly, the difference in libido is proving something of a difficulty). 

The problem is Kouichi, snatched from Earth to fulfill a kingdom's needs, still feels an obligation to live up to expectations and decisions and connections in the world he came from. Love doesn't wipe all that out. Since Caius cares for him, he doesn't want Kouichi to suffer, even though he feels a responsibility to his own people. 

Difficult decisions for both these characters exist despite mutual affection. And, oh yeah, they are a giant and a halfling. 

Character comes before stature.

Manga Art in Motion: Yusuke Murata

I comment in a previous post that Sanami Matoh created some of the best in-motion manga art ever. 

Yusuke Murata, the artist for One-Punch Man, runs a close second. The action sequences are quite fun to "read" since they thankfully take up entire pages (rather than being crammed into side panels). 

However, even the "still" moments or pauses have a pleasing energy. After my reading of Volume 25, I had to remind myself that the sequence where Sekingar throws a phone to Genos and Genos takes off have not yet been committed to available anime. The scenes I was remembering were from the manga, not from anything in digital motion. 

Impressive!

Cats & Women

In Are You Being Served? Mrs. Slocombe makes constant references to her "pussy" or housecat. These references nearly always have a double entendre.

I always assumed that the jokes were a British thing. And in fact, the writers of Are You Being Served? say as much: that they deliberately set out to make the term sexual. They wanted a single element of Mrs. Slocombe's life that she constantly references to have double-meaning. They could have used anything.

But maybe not. I'm currently reading about the Impressionists. According to the author, in the nineteenth century, cats and women carried an inherently "wink wink, nudge nudge" aura throughout all territory covered by the Impressionists. 

With Olympia, Manet used a cat (with a raised tail) rather than a dog. That caused alarm among critics. Renoir, who loved to paint women, women everywhere, raised eyebrows over Sleeping Girl with a Cat not with the fallen sleeve but by having a cat sprawled on the young woman's lap in the first place.  

They are coy creatures that seem entirely predictable until they are not. Paglia would posit that the forward leaning "sky"-trajectory male is confounded by (or, in Renoir's case, appreciative of) the earthy "cave-like" secretiveness of the female. In Truth & Consequences by Sarah Madison, the male FBI agent--who is deliberately trying to provoke a pompous male character he dislikes--postulates, "Everything [serial killers] claim to hate about cats, their independence, their 'slyness' is actually a projection of what they don't like about women, instead."

I love my cats but I can't get too sentimental or profound about them, even symbolically. I postulate that my cats in the Farside cartoon would be saying, "Food! Food? Food, food, food. Pet me. Food!"  

Age and Art

In a single manga, drawings of characters can vary. This is, in fact, one of the inviting things about drawn comics as opposed to photonovels.

What drawn images mean, however, is that a character in a single manga or graphic novel can vary in appearance. Marriage counselor Serizawa from The Love Guide by Ayano Yamane looks his assigned age in the first panel (20-ish), somewhat younger in the second. Out of curiosity, I examined multiple panels closely to figure out the difference.

Close examination is how cartoonists, mangaka, graphic artists, and anime artists work. With Gollum, for example, from day 1, Jackson et al. used minute details plus Andy Serkis's facial expressions to give Gollum a personality. (Of course, this type of thing can create the uncanny valley.)

In the case of Serizawa, what makes a person older? How do we humans age?

1. Longer chin
2. More defined nose
3. Not quite so large eyes
4. Wider mouth proportionally

For example, here is Harry Potter younger and Harry Potter older over the first two films. In the Chronicles of Narnia, Skandar Keynes on occasion appears to be aging on screen (growing teenagers must cause havoc with director continuity).

I took a young image of Serizawa and aged it. Below is the result.

Which basically means that I'm no artist. But the result is interesting--this image does look older than its original, which has taught me something about how people age and how people see and how much we take for granted with what we see. Most of the time, we readers think, "Oh, he looks younger," not, "Why does he look younger?"

Hot Protagonists: How Shallow Is It to Read About Them?

Describing the "hot" protagonists is a motif in romance novels. Some readers like it--that's one reason they read romances.

Some readers dislike it--why does everyone have to be so gorgeous?

Here are three points:

1. Romances are fantasies.

I am not a fan of the Twilight series, books or movies. I find it boring. However, when the first book became popular, I got annoyed at the accompanying hysteria. Far too many people were dumping on the Twilight series for "making" young girls care only about (hot) guys and marriage, not college and careers.

Apparently, none of these hysterical people remembered being teenagers. I read tons of romances when I was a teen. I also read Lord Jim and Cancer Ward (voluntarily) as well as  Shakespeare. Frankly, I was better read--and my friends who loaned me romance novels were better read--than my intellectual friends who insisted on sticking to stuff like Thoreau and discussing Ayn Rand.

So I greatly admire Inside Out for its "tragic vampire romance island" and the melodramatic imaginary boyfriend. Because that's reality: teenage girls like thinking and talking and speculating about dating--"boys," to use the vernacular. 

Get over it.

2. Many times, the "hot-ness" is how protagonists describe each other, not necessarily how they appear to other characters.

In Change of Address by Jordan Brock, the protagonist Josh is obviously, well, Sam (Sean Astin) from The Lord of the Rings.

Okay, not obviously, but his family's business is Bagel End. Plus Josh is blond with shaggy curls, stocky, and winsome. He perceives himself as entirely ordinary and not exactly svelte.

His tall, svelte lover, Michael, sees him from the beginning as attractive and charming.

This is less hopeful thinking than it sounds. Yes, the human brain is wired to find certain looks attractive, but the human brain is also wired to be idiosyncratic about what it finds attractive. I can accept, intellectually, that David James Elliot is a very handsome guy, but it's Peter Falk who makes me go weak at the knees.

And, yes, okay, Sean Astin is adorable.

3. Descriptions in romance books often-times appear to be publisher requirements.

Granted, Simon Baker is very handsome.

One of my favorite traditional romances is Romancing Mr. Bridgerton by Julia Quinn, in large part because it discusses writing. The main male character, Colin, is described as tall, dark-haired, etc. etc. He is slightly shorter than his tall, dark-haired brothers, but still well within the Colin Firth/Darcy wheelhouse.

Except . . . I have read the book about four times now, and every time I forget the description by the time I'm a third of the way through. It's kind of a throw-away description (The Bridgerton brothers are all so handsome!). No matter how he is described initially, I see Colin constantly and consistently as Simon Baker. More Bingley than Darcy. More James Roday than anybody from James Bond.

The author doesn't go out of her way to enforce her own description, so after read-through #2, I began to wonder how much it really mattered.

I've encountered this experience elsewhere--to the point where I often think that the writer doesn't really care about looks or has personal own ideas about them; the description is for the cover, and sometimes, publishers get even that wrong. 

Romance Covers Improved

Sometimes a romance cover is great!

Sometimes, it's just wrong.

In an earlier post, I discuss the change in traditional romance covers over the last few decades, from a woman & a man or only a woman to sometimes only a man. I didn't mention that now-a-days, romance covers are sometimes purely artistic, such as the original covers for Deanna Raybourn's romance/suspense Lady Julia Grey series.

Most romance covers, however, stick to people's faces. And/or beautiful bodies. But mostly faces. This may be gender-specific: mostly women read romances, and women care more about faces and facial expressions than men (reportedly, car advertisements never include close-ups of people because male buyers care more about the car than who's driving it--so was this commercial aimed at women or men? After all, one of my male students, after seeing it, said, "Wow, that makes me want to watch a Van Damme movie!" Not, "Hey, that makes me want to buy a Volvo!") 

The problem with faces is when they are cheesy or don't match the description in the text. The cover for A Seditious Affair falls into the latter category. It's well-done but makes me cringe. Dom (or Silas) is simply not that young.

The cover for One Indulgence falls into the first category and is painful to look at. If I actually thought the characters were like this, I'd never read the book. (I did--it's well-written; the cover is still horrible.)

Occasionally, a cover gets it so right, it's astonishing. I feel the same way I do towards Jackson's Fellowship of the Rings, which I consider one of the most perfectly cast movies in history.

The cover of A Minor Inconvenience by Sarah Granger was obviously rendered by someone who actually read the book and got the main character (in the background), a young man who sees himself far differently than others see him. The disparity isn't obvious since so much of the book is told from his perspective. Kudos to the artist for picking up on the difference and getting him right!

In truth (as countless movie watchers can attest), matching a character in a book to a character in a visual is no easy feat. In the Harriet-Vane-Peter Wimsey BBC series, Harriet Walter is perfect as Harriet Vane; Petheridge not even close (in my mind) to Wimsey.

Consequently, I am often prepared to give a cover kudos if it captures ambience or theme or a relationship, even if the drawings/photographs don't match my vision. The sepia-tinted covers for the early editions of the Cambridge Fellows Series are quite charming and capture the time period. The "Jonty" stand-in, in the background, is not how I imagine Jonty but the design is so lovely--and the images so close to accurate--I give it a thumbs up.

Occasionally, however, I feel compelled to alter a cover to my personal specifications.

Hey, playing with romance covers is a respectable past-time! Check out the Lindsey covers (and Bored Panda).

I went ahead and altered the cover of KJ Charles's excellent Think of England (one of the best plotted romances on record). The original cover shows Archie, who is described in the book as a "Viking." He is a big blond soldier who gets along with preppies but is not one.

I can't stand the preppie on the original cover (it could be the soulful expression), so I replaced it with my own (to the left). And yes, I'm aware that the characters I used are from some Cable show.

Apple & Honey: His Rose-Colored Life: College Angst and Art

Apple & Honey: His Rose-Colored Life by Hideyoshico is one of my absolute favorite manga volumes. It is quiet and ordinary, being the tale of two boyfriends in college. Their meeting is actually described in a prior volume of short stories Apple & Honey.

The second volume focuses on Natsuki and Komano exclusively (and has some of the funniest single strip stories I've ever read). It details the beginning days of their relationship, leading up and past when they first have sex. It is the ultimate show-don't-tell. The psychology is all through interaction. There is some inner dialog, but it is the inner dialog of the moment, not the inner dialog of reflection and explanation. The author never tells us how to think.

Some readers criticize the volume because one character starts out as ostensibly "straight". I address this criticism in a prior complaint. For now, I'll state that the designation isn't the character's although he doesn't deny it either--when used by the narrator, the label appears to be more wry than absolute.

And it is irrelevant to what the young men are going through. Natsuki's self-effacing and pained comment early on in their relationship, "You were a popular kid, weren't you?" followed by Komano's uncertain response (he was but doesn't want to say so) is so perfect to the age (19/20) and the milieu (a college cafeteria surrounded by their noisy friends), it rings true at every level.

This is slice-of-life taken to the nth degree. Honestly--it makes me happy not to be 20 any more since I can relate too well. But it also impresses me with its profound comprehension of human nature.

* * *

Another odd criticism of this and other manga is "the art is bad because it is incomplete--sketchy."

I have seen quite a lot of manga art that I didn't care for. But the reason had nothing to do with the style being bad. It had everything to do with personal taste.

That is, there are certain styles of art I don't care for--like cubism, for example--but that does not mean that cubism is an inherently bad style. It isn't. I can admire Guernica even if I have zero desire to hang it in my house.

When I read this type of criticism in reviews, I start thinking that Paglia has a point: not training students in art makes them witless. I go on and on a bit more about that here.

A lovely final scene from Apple &

Honey that captures the loneliness of

being uncertain in a couple.

Why Erotic Isn't Automatically Explicit: Boy Princess Review

One series I collected is the manhwa Boy Princess by Seyoung Kim. It was an unusual series for me to collect because (1) it means I'm reading left to right! (2) I don't much care for the art--everyone, except Jed, the Crown Prince, and the guys with beards, looks feminine in an elongated way that seems specific to Korean manhwa; I have a hard time telling people apart (and I don't usually care for androgynous characters).

Bride of the Water God is a good example

of excellent manhwa art. See elongated

lines from Boy Princess below.

However, I greatly enjoy it. Unlike some other kings-princes-princesses manga, the politics is actually as complicated and layered as politics should be. Far too often in fantasy/sci-fi, the politics is either so simplistic, it makes your brain melt or so complexly muddy, one suspects the writer has no more idea than the reader what is going on. There are exceptions: among American writers, Asimov and Cherryh are excellent at creating complex yet explainable politics.

The other reason I get a kick out of Boy Princess is how entirely non-explicit yet erotic it manages to be. I discuss explicit versus non-explicit art in other places, such as here and here. My overall point is that explicit art is not automatically skanky but that non-explicit art is not automatically lacking in eroticism. Sometimes it is what is unsaid/unshown that matters more than what is said/shown.

The story basically follows the adventures of a teenage (15/16) prince, Nicole (total tangent: in 1990, .006 of American boys were named Nicole), and the prince of a neighboring kingdom, Jed. The premise is, okay, slightly ridiculous: Nicole's sister runs away before the marriage, so the family in desperation sends a disguised Nicole in the rather extreme hope that it's only a marriage-of-form and will give them time to set things right.

And the less ridiculous politics ensue: Jed is not the crown prince but he has the army's loyalty, so although the crown prince moves against him, he has to do it subtly. The crown prince appears to be acting with his mother's backing but likely has his own agenda. And the palace apothecary--who becomes embroiled in everyone's secrets--has HIS own agenda in a major way. And then there are various marriage proposals being suggested or knocked down by various allies and enemies of the two kingdoms.

In the middle of all this, Nicole (rather innocently and desperately) and Jed (wiser and more aware of the possible problems) fall in love.

Nicole remembering being with Jed.

In Volume 3, Nicole runs off to see Jed again (he was temporarily returned to his kingdom). Jed finds him wandering in the forest between their kingdoms and takes measures to hide Nicole's identity. However, he also spends the night with Nicole. They don't have sex. The reader is left with the impression that Jed merely held Nicole--until Nicole returns home and his brothers discover that Jed left a few love bites on Nicole.

The discovery scene is practically a throw-away--a few extra panels that clarify that Jed was restrained but smitten. (Nicole always just does what he wants.) It is highly erotic in a way that a million explicit panels could never achieve. Kudos to the author/illustrator.

Collection Review: Until the Full Moon

Until the Full Moon and @ the Full Moon take me back to Sanami Matoh (Fake). I read them because of Fake. Matoh has also written a number of fantasy manga full of high jinks and ADHD characters. These latter manga are cute but rather too frantic for my tastes. Fake has its own moments of over-the-top antics and scenarios, but it is grounded in the "case" structure. There are also plenty of reflective moments in Fake, especially for the series' couple.

Until the Full Moon and its sequel @ the Full Moon fall between Fake and Matoh's more high energy manga. The premise is delightful (and common to Japanese manga): a character, Marlo, is male except during the full moon when he becomes female. His change makes it possible for his family to marry him to his childhood friend, David, who is totally fine with the whole wacky world of Marlo (and happens to love both male and female Marlo equally although the ostensibly shojo manga is quite coy about the sexual relationship between them and implies at the end that Marlo will now be female most of the time and only male during the full moon, which will make having a baby possible since Marlo can hide during the full moon to stay female).

The manga is fun, mostly due to Marlo's female persona; although entirely female and downright cute, she is still rather tomboyish. Taken together, she/he is absolutely darling. The first volume has a stronger set of stories and the first set (Until the Full Moon) is better plotted than the second (@ the Full Moon), but both are engaging.

My favorite part is the short story at the end of Volume 1: the fairy tale explanation for Marlo's condition that takes place in a Stephen Sondheim-like past. It's sweetly romantic with a decent pay-off.

@ the Full Moon is fascinating because Matoh's art changes; the top and bottom image are from Until the Full Moon while the middle images are from the later @ the Full Moon. In one of her afterwords, Matoh argues that her art didn't change that much--it was always developing in a single direction. And I think she has a point. But it is noticeably different. I didn't care for the difference at first, not because I didn't like the art itself but because I'm such a huge admirer of Fake, which resembles her older style more than her recent one.

However, Matoh still manages to capture motion, which is a powerful and admirable skill for a mangaka.

Animals and Personality in Manga

When I was growing up, my family occasionally played a kind of 20-anthropomorphizing-questions game; the answer was always a person while the questions included, "What kind of animal would this person be?" "What kind of plant?" "What kind of wrapping paper?" and so on.

The question did not refer to the type of animal or plant or wrapping paper the person liked but, rather, what characteristics the person shared with the animal or plant or wrapping paper.

Manga employs these sorts of comparisons consistently and naturally;  animals are the default analogy. Although characters are most often compared to cats and dogs, they are also compared to bears, rabbits, even tigers.

In Apple & Honey: His Rose-Colored Life, Natsuki compares Komano to a cat AND to a dog. In Honey Darling, the main protagonist not only finds and cares for an (actual) adorable little cat but has the personality of one (he compares his roommate, the veterinarian, to a bear). And in Rabbit Man, Tiger Man (see below), the entire point of the characters is that one is a rabbit (the Doc) and one is a tiger (Yakuza-san). Can a rabbit and tiger get along?

Hilariously, the bonus story at the end of otherwise serious-minded Maiden Rose is an over-the-top farce where the main characters are re-imagined as a cat and a dog (see above). Forget Gnomeo & Juliet: when it comes to satires, looks like Animal Farm hits closer to home!

Generally speaking, throughout manga, cats/cat characters are quiet, clever, and luxury-minded while dogs/dog characters are extroverted, blunt, and friendly. Cats are quite popular in Japan though dogs have their own following. Being compared to any animal is a mark of having "arrived"!

More Thoughts About Skanky v. Non-Skanky Art

As I mentioned in a previous post, skanky art lacks affection.

Another problem, of course, is that it lacks purpose.

The difference between skanky and non-skanky art isn't so much the explicitness or non-explicitness of the art. Nor does it lie in the use of sex scenes at all although one can cogently argue that art doesn't need sex scenes to work; the "Hays" Code certainly didn't harm director creativity. On the other hand, sex is not in and of itself a problem.

The difference is more fundamental: skanky art doesn't move the story forward. Non-skanky art does.

A reviewer on Amazon sums up the difference extremely well:  "I'd rather have well-written sexual tension than a bunch of sex scenes slapped together."

Skanky art has a pro forma feel--as do skanky interludes in many romance novels: Now it is time for the protagonists to have sex! The reader may feel manipulated but the problem is more fundamental. Not only does the reader learn nothing new about the plot or characters from the interlude, the interlude feels out of sync with the rest of the text. Rather than a seamless narrative arc (I am a proponent of the traditional and classic narrative arc), the reader is faced with a unnecessary lull (and if it is badly written, not even a fun unnecessary lull).

A good example of not including an unnecessary lull occurs in the film of Ordinary People. In the book, the Timothy Hutton character, Conrad, has sex with his new girlfriend. In the book, this interlude is fairly pointless; in the movie, it would have been utterly pointless.

I read the book, then watched the movie for a high school class: English, probably. Some of my friends complained at the missing material because "the sex scene showed how much the characters love each other!"

Problem: the teen characters' love for each other was largely irrelevant to the arc that Robert Redford decided to pursue.

My reaction--"But including that scene wouldn't have worked"--was not due to prudishness (I remember having no problem with Romeo and Juliet's overworked sex scene in Zeffirelli's lush Romeo & Juliet although I find the film rather silly now). I remember being surprised by my friends' suggestion because I couldn't imagine how the scene would have moved events forward without distracting us viewers from the movie's main story: the relationship between the son and his parents, specifically the father. If it was a different type of movie . . . but it wasn't.

In comparison, the bedroom scenes in Apple & Honey: His Rose-Colored Life, my favorite contemporary manga to date, are completely relevant to the plot and to the readers' comprehension of the characters. Again, one can argue that an author doesn't need sex scenes to sell a reader on a relationship. Fumi Yoshinaga's What Did You Eat Yesterday? does impressively well without them.

Loretta: You know, I didn't really think she was gonna die.
I knew she was sick. (Ronny: She had TB.)
Loretta: I know! I mean, she was coughing her brains out,
and still she had to keep singing!

But the situations and context of Apple & Honey mean that the sex scenes move the plot and characters forward--much like the sexual discussions and interludes in Moonstruck underscore the motivations, choices, and decisions of the characters. College students and sex is rather the point of the former just as married couples and sex is rather the point of the latter.

"Where are we going?" is a perfectly legitimate question in art. The moment an artist says, "But I need to use this trope, moment, event, statement not because it helps the story but to express myself!" . . . be wary.

Skanky versus Non-Skanky Art in Manga

Hot sex --> being in love

Being in love --> hot sex

For awhile now, I've been trying to figure out the difference between explicit skanky art in manga and explicit non-skanky art in manga.

It isn't the depiction of intimacies nor is it the explicitness. But once those two variables are discounted, what else could possibly explain the difference?

My tentative conclusion at this point is that skanky art delivers the first above equation; non-skanky art delivers the second.

Note: I am not arguing a philosophy of relationships. I do in fact support the second equation over the first (as does Booth from Bones--see the episode about the horse fetishers), but while what I feel personally might account for the adjective (skanky), it wouldn't account entirely for my initial reactions. That is, I am processing the art before I process the text. And there is a difference.

Although Ayano Yamane's art occasionally hits the borderline, it consistently stays on the "being in love/caring" side of the argument. A non-bedroom scene of Asami and Akihito (in garb that is unrelated to the series) illustrates why: Akihito's hands lay lightly on Asami's shoulder and back; Asami's hand rests unselfconsciously on Akihito's thigh. The affection is palpable, an affection that carries over into the bedroom scenes; the characters' body language is natural and easy rather than belabored.

In skanky art, everyone seems to be trying so hard. There is also a consistent lack of warmth, which explains why Ken doll art falls into the skanky category (rather difficult to warm up a Ken doll), and reminds me of an Agatha Christie quote from A Caribbean Mystery:

Modern novels. Very difficult--all about such unpleasant people, doing such very odd things and not, apparently, even enjoying them. "Sex" as a word had not been much mentioned in Miss Marple's young days, but there had been plenty of it--not talked about so much--but enjoyed far more than nowadays or so it seemed to her. Though usually labelled Sin, she wouldn't help feeling that that was preferable to what is seemed to be nowadays--a kind of Duty.

At the end of Black Sun, Leonard has

finally learned to tease Jamal back.

Speaking of enjoyment, Jamal and Leonard's seemingly unlikely compatibility in Black Sun is highlighted by their easy physical "banter."

Character development plays a role here. Despite his spiritual and idealistic nature, Leonard is more than capable of keeping up with Jamal physically. Leonard may have a sweet and ethereal disposition; his desire for touch, for affection, has been a fundamental aspect of his personality from childhood. Jamal's larger-than-life persona at first evokes hero-worship from Leonard. But Jamal doesn't want to be set on a pedestal (it's so boring). He provides Leonard with a down-to-earth reality that Leonard never anticipated and finds incredibly restful.

Ultimately, it is restfulness that seems to pervade most non-skanky art--including the hot & heavy scenes. Even when couples have problems (Katsuragi and Akihito from Blue Morning, Komano and Natsuki from Apple & Honey), the art says, "But, you know, they really like each other--and they find it easy to be together."

Body language transcends words. 

Complaint 1: Photonovels

Star Trek photonovel

Beginning of rant:

I hate photonovels.

Photonovels are graphic novels--and manga--in which the panels are selected scenes from an already extant movie/series.

Howl's Moving Castle, of which I am quite fond, has a photonovel series. It makes me very sad.

The problems with photonovels ares (1) one might as well watch the movie or episode. I suppose if someone was stuck on the edge of civilization where one couldn't even get movies on one's phone (which nowadays, yeah, people can), the photonovel might serve a purpose. Otherwise, why bother? Why not engage with the real thing?

(2) The scenes are selected to remind the reader of the original story, not for artistic value. 

Manga art can be incredibly clever and evocative; one comes away with a slightly different interpretation of the story based on the artist's choices, from point of view to perspective to additional text.

So, for example, even a manga that follows a series (rather than preceding it), if drawn, can still deliver a different feel. Reading such a manga volume--Library Wars, for instance--provides the reader/viewer with a new "take," like seeing a classic fairy tale in different garb (another of my favorite hobbies is retold fairy tales). One comes away expanded, fulfilled, entranced, and thoughtful.

The photonovel doesn't provide a different perspective and even the perspective it does provide is rarely artistic or connotative. That is, the person who slapped the photonovel together isn't carefully selecting or editing particular scenes to tell the story in a unique way. (Hey, let's present the movie this way!)

The photonovel is not all that different, really, from pasting pictures on a sheet and flipping through them, so they move. Doing so would be far more engaging than reading the stupid thing.

Okay, end of rant.