Mustumi Natsuo is a name with which we at Okazu are familiar. Mutsumi-sensei was the face of the Boyish² Butch x Butch Yuri Anthology project last year. This year, Mutsumi-sensei ran a Kickstarter for a new work, also a butch x butch comic. And, like the last project, this one blew past early goals. In fact, we’ll be getting a voiced reading of the comic at some point, since stretch goals were likewise met.
So today, I thought we’d take a look at My Date Is A Total Ike Woman, the English language edition of Date Aite Ga Ikemen Onna Datta Kudan (デート相手がイケメン♀だった件). Both Japanese and English language editions are available on the Tomboys Booth.pm page, where you can purchase them both as a physical book and as digital. When I backed the Kickstarter, I pledged for both the JP and EN editions as physical books. As soon as the PDFs became available, I scooped them up, so I could talk about them here!
The title of this comic is a pun on the Japanese word ikemen (イケメン) which means an attractive guy. We’ve seen that in some works here, like, Ikemen Onna to Hakoiri Musume and Ikemen Sugidesu Shiki-senpai! For anyone familiar with the term, this title would be expressive.
My Date Is A Total Ike Woman is a 37-page comic about Ushio and Asahi, two otaku butches on a blind date at an amusement park. In this short story, there are so many qualities that makes this comic worth owning and reading. When they meet for the first time, they are both blown away how cool each other is…and immediately become intimidated in rather cute and relatable ways. They spend their date negotiating boundaries both mental and physical. Both are otaku, with different interests, but both have had some negative experiences and don’t want to give up to much and get hurt. As the date goes on, they learn to open up and be honest with each other. This comic ends in a perfectly satisfying way that makes me hope for a sequel some day.
The translation is very good. In an early page Asahi sees Ushio for the first time and thinks, “Crap, their hotness level is clearly over 9000!” which of course made me laugh out loud, being a good otaku myself. The art is simple, with fantastic body language and facial expressions. When they should look cool, they look very cool indeed. For sample pages, check out Mutsumi-sensei’s Twitter page.
If you’d like to read an engaging comic featuring two butch women on a date, definitely get yourself over to Tomboys and grab yourself a copy!
Ratings:
Art – 9 100% in wheelhouse
Story – 9 Covers a lot of ground in few pages
Characters – 9 So cute
Service – Well, ahem, cute butch women, so…10 for me
LGBTQ – 10
Overall – 9
The book ends with an interview of Mutsumi-sensei, about trying to create more queer comics in Japan. Obviously, I will always support that.
I hope we’ll get more of these two and their various otaku pursuits. ^_^
