It’s utter crap, but it’s fun crap.

Kawai Kirika wants, more than anything else in the whole wide world, to be a manga artist. Her dream consumes her, drives her – she is *determined* to become a pro. So, when every shoujo manga company she visits rejects her work for being too adult, she takes a risk and goes to a shounen company. To her shock, they accept her…but on one condition. The magazine she’s working for is an S&M manga magazine. The editor, an evil tick of a guy (who will probably end up being good, because you know, he pushed her to be the best she could be) requires her to study up on BDSM and submit a story.

Okay…let me repeat – Eve no Ringo: Evasapfel (Eve’s Apple in English) is utter crap. ^_^

The next few chapters follow Kirika as she studies up on, and participates in, BDSM in ways that are actually quite sweet and silly. In one chapter, she explores what being a typical S&M Oujou-sama might be like, by tying up her best friend in the manga club – Matsuda-kun, who also happens to have a crush on her. She proceeds to whip the daylights out of him, then complain to him that her feet hurt from wearing stiletto-heeled boots. Jokingly, she orders him to lick her feet…but they both learn pretty quickly that they kind of like that.

There’s some more mutual discovery, and ultimately Kirika is drawn deeper and deeper (but with no lessening of her naivete and shock) into the world of S&M comics. A rival author, Miyamae, turns out to be pretty hardcore (she walks around naked and bound to be able to “experience the feeling”) and manages to finagle Kirika into a little light “research,” with some small Yuri-esque service.

Although she’s barely had a page or two published by Editor Evil, Kirika is put in charge of an even newer talent, Yumiko, who promptly blows the last of Kirika’s personal boundaries away, by asking her to play the part of a man and have sex with her (for research, of course.) This is followed by a remarkably silly chapter dealing with vibrators.

It’s all so goofy and cute that it’s not offensive, even while it’s all fanservice. I like it enough that if I encounter another volume, I’ll get it.

Ratings:
Story – 7
Characters – 7
Art – 7
Yuri – 7

Overall – 7

If you’re easily offended, probably not the best choice. But if you can read a chapter about a boy dressed like a nun paddling a girl in school uniform in front of a crazy older manga artist who is laughing like a hyena and demanding that her assistants capture the feeling in ink and laugh, then you’ll probably enjoy Eve’s Apple. ^_^