Yuri Network News – (百合ネットワークニュース) – September 16, 2017

September 16th, 2017

Yuri Manga

Via YNN Correspondent Jin H., Seven Seas has announced a new Yuri manga license! Mushroom Girls in Love by Morayama Kei is exactly what the title says. In fact, we have a guest review by Bruce P to prove it to you. Take a look at his review of Kinoko Ningen no Kekkon  (きのこ人間の結婚) – which would translate to The Mushroom People’s Wedding, which wouldn’t tell you how gay it is. So there you go.

Also out this month are two do-not-miss manga: From Seven Seas is Kase-san and Shortcake by Takashima Hiromi, the third of this excellent schoolgirls-in-love series.  Volume 1 of Viz’s edition of Sweet Blue Flowers, is  heading for American shelves this week, as well. This will be the third translation of this same volume I’ve read. I wonder what I’ll think about it!

Some more exciting news from Seven Seas…ANN reports that they have licensed the original Cutey Honey manga! This is so full of wtf, ugly art, naked women, and extraordinary violence, you’ll either love it or hate or, more probably, both at the same time. This news comes on the tail of a release of the best version of this mythos.  Cutey Honey-a-Gogo is, in my opinion, the ultimate manga version of the Cutey Honey story. With art by Shimpei Itou and story by Go Nagai, I love this manga so much. Cutey Honey was the first magical girl who didn’t need a man, and this version presents us with a butched-up Na-chan for our viewing pleasure. It’s not “Yuri” per se, but it rides the line closely and I love it. ^_^ So, we’re getting the oldest and the newest in the franchise. If Seven Seas is smart, they skip any other versions and stick to the two good ones they have.

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Yuri Anime

The anime based on Amano Sakuya’s Konohana Kitan, which originally began serialization in Comic Yuri Hime S, but has since moved to Birz comics, has announced new cast and staff. members Among them Ogata Megumi announced that she’ll be playing the landlady in the upcoming production. The anime will premier on 9/24 in Japan. This is a Yuri story that stars fox-girls at a hot springs, so expect very high fanservice ratings on this. I made the mistake last week of bitching that Ichijinsha was at fault putting this anime out. I was mistake –  the publisher is Gentosha, but perhaps you’ll forgive me when you realize that Itou Hachi is currently drawing a *different* moe kimono-clad fox-girl manga called Tsuki ga Kirei desu ne for Yuri Hime magazine right now – I have to be honest they looked the same to me. I never even noticed that it wasn’t Amano’s story, but a wholly different identical concept. Guess the editor-in-chief has a(nother) fetish. 

Crunchyroll has added Kurau Phantom Memory, an anime that I loved and hated and finally came to like. Here are all my reviews of the series.

Over on Anime Now, Kat Callahan has a look at the Yuri in the anime A Centaur’s Life in A Centaur’s Life’s Low-Key Lesbian Relationships Add to Positive LGBT Representation In Japan.
 

Event News 

For folks in or near Tokyo on September 24, 20OL is an all Yuri-about-adults comics event. Don’t think I haven’t thought about just flying over for the weekend to go to this. In fact, my fingers hovered over the button for hours last night. If anyone is able to go, please do report back! If (it doesn’t blow and) they hold a second one, I’ll add it to my schedule. ^_^; 

 

Other News

The Powerpuff Girls are getting a new addition to the team, and the folks at Pink News note that she’ll be voiced by South African lesbian singer Toya Delazy.  

 

Know some cool Yuri News you want people to know about? Become a Yuri Network Correspondent by sending me any Yuri-related news you find.Emails go to anilesbocon01 at hotmail dot com. Not to the comments here, please, or they might be forgotten or missed. There’s a reason for this madness. This way I know you are a real human, not Anonymous (which I do not encourage – stand by your words with your name!) and I can send you a YNN correspondent’s badge.

Thanks to all of you – you make this a great Yuri Network!

Posted in Yuri Network News | 3 Comments »


Drama CD: Grand Stage Special Performance (グラン・ステージ 特別公演)

September 14th, 2017

The Drama CD Grand Stage Special Performance (グラン・ステージ 特別公演) is technically the end of the first season of the series, but I had listened to the second group CD, Grand Stage Daiundokai , first, so I ended up listening to this one last of all the Grand Stage Drama CDs. And I have to tell you, it worked really well as a final CD for the series, so I don’t feel bad at all about it.

In the opening tracks, the established otokayaku of the Sora-gumi troupe, Suoh Yui, Hiou Akito, Subaru Ryoya and Kazmiya Eru meet the newest of their group – Minami Kohaku. Kohaku’s sister Kurea, is well known to all of them, so Kohaku, it turns out, has a reputation to live up to.

The bulk of the CD follows the otoyaku as a group. The leader of the Sora-gumi is planning a special performance and the otokoyaku are being asked to do a play – “Passive-Aggressive Red Riding Hood.” Frankly, I think Ryoya is a natural fit and I’m not the only one, but there’s a problem. The otokoyaku are not well-suited to play the female role. Hiou and Yui try to play the part together, but they both end up sounding like otokoyaku. Eru has a small crisis at the very idea of even attempting to play a female role, something that had this been in any way an LGBTQ series they could have made a plot point. But instead, they just circle around Eru’s insistence on being a cool guy on stage. They do the same for Ryoya’s inability to be in Kabuki. Lost opportunities to speak about gender roles and Japanese culture, but oh well. In the end, they play it for a comedy with Hiou in the role and then look forward to their musumeyaku doing their performance.

Ratings:

Overall – 9

It was a a fun end to what was a more amazing than I could have ever have expected series of Drama CDs. I’m gonna have to listen to them once more from the top. ^_^

Posted in Drama CDs & Audiobooks, Grand Stage | 2 Comments »


LGBTQ Webcomic: Always Human

September 12th, 2017

Webcomics are one of the most fascinating niches in the comics market and it’s long past time that we talk about them once again..

Webcomics became a “thing” in the late 1990s, and by the early 2000s, it was already possible to find LGBTQ content on any number of platforms. By 2003, I was keeping bookmarks of aggregate lists of lesbian and “Yuri” webcomics from half a dozen sites. Finding webcomics wasn’t hard, but finding really good ones, well that’s always been the challenge.   ^_^ As time has passed, webcomics have gone from being a junior league for upcoming artists to being a marketplace in their own right. Webcomics can successfully raise money from backers for print books, publishers are looking at Pixiv and deviantart for talent, and with Patreon and Webtoons, comic artists can get get paid for the work, as well as for the finished project. This particular niche in the comics ecosystem has only just developed those bridges to the larger comics landscape, and I don’t think we’ve more than just barely begun to see their potential. 

Which brings me to one of the best webcomics I have read. Ever. Today we’re talking about Always Human, by Ari North.  Ari sent me a message in 2016, asking me to mention her comic to you as part of a YNN report and I was glad to. I’ve been reading Always Human on Webtoons ever since. This week I finally had a chance to catch up and complete it and all I can say is that this is one of the best uses of the Internet for comics that I’ve seen. 

Ari’s art is colorful watercolor-like washes, with a vertical scroll and a lot of white space. It could, of course, be  reformatted for print, as Pulse was, but the larger, more open format of the online page, means that you can enjoy the details that fill up your screen, and not lose any of it. Often chapters comes with an original soundtrack, which you can listen to for free on Soundcloud. This really added to the atmosphere of every chapter. 

The story is sweet, honest and realistic. It’s also a lot of fun. Set in a future Earth, where virtual reality allows for body modification, gaming, communication – humans are working in deep seas and space- the people who populate Always Human are indeed quite human. Designer Sunati meets college student Austen, and they fall in love.  

While the story is primarily romance, it’s a romance that doesn’t isolate Austen or Sunati. Theirs is a world with colleagues and friends and family, which is so important to me as a reader. Unlike mainstream media, which seems to want to wallow in alternative worst scenarios, without  allowing us to work through our uncomfortable realities first, Always Human provides a more progressive world for us to spend time in. Austen has two fathers and Sunati’s parents have a boyfriend, and none of that is a “thing” that must be dealt with, beyond the stress of meeting one’s lover’s parents, which is – as we all know – stressful enough in itself.

Sunati and Austen are adults living adult lives, but they are still young adults, so they are neck deep in the process of creating the lives they hope to live. They aren’t perfect, they make mistakes and deal with the consequences, as we might expect. Even when they annoyed me – and they did – I was rooting for them As Ari says about her comic,”This is a story about nanobots, genetic engineering, and two girls falling in love. No matter how technology changes us, we’ll always be human.” And so they are.

Ratings:

Art – 10
Characters – 10
Story – 10
LGBTQ – 10
Service -1 on principle

Overall – 10

If you’re looking for a really good webcomic to read, I recommend Always Human. Luckily for us, Ari’s working on another comic for Webtoons. I’m waiting with bated breath for more from this talented artist.

Posted in LGBTQ, Yuri Webcomics | 3 Comments »


LGBTQ Manga: Shimanami Tasogare, Volume 2 (しまなみ誰そ彼 2)

September 11th, 2017

Last month, I reported on a fascinating series called Shimanami Tasogare. In Volume 1, we met Tasuku, a young man who hadn’t, as of yet, come to terms with his homosexuality. When he meets a bunch of older gay folks working on a cat shelter, he finds a cause to volunteer his time for, and a place to open his heart.

In Shimanami Tasogare, Volume 2, (しまなみ誰そ彼) Tasuku gets to see what self-loathing looks like from the outside. One of the people who visits the consulting room is a young kid still in elementary school. Misora visits to change into female clothes and life. But Misora never seems particularly happy and is clearly struggling with what puberty is doing to her.  And, she has an ugly tendency to lash out whenever she feels that Tasuku gets too close.

Tasuku is starting think about his own feelings more honestly, and has now realized that he has a crush on an attractive classmate, Kiku-kun. Misora is not at all kind about the bits of information Tasuku shares. And every time Tasuku feels as if he’s gotten a little closer to Misora, she attacks him with a vitriol with which  – we can see  – she means to scar herself. The volume ends on a particularly harsh note, with Misora attacking Tasuku in public in front of the guy he likes at a festival. 

Tasuku retreats to to the unfinished shelter, to lay the shards of his emotions next to the broken beams of the building. The strong visual imaging this series gives to Tasuku’s emotions are just stellar.

Meanwhile, we are led to believe that Tasuku’s secret is out to a classmate we don’t know whether we can trust or not.

It’s an uncomfortable ending to an uncomfortable volume filled with the damage self-loathing does to one’s self and others, without a moral of the story to pretty it up. I’m compelled to read it nonetheless and am very interested to see where it leads.

Ratings: 

Art – 8
Story – 9
Characters- 8 
LGBTQ – 10
Service – 0

Overall – 9

The mysterious Dareka-san functions as a kind of guardian angel but, as a result, I really don’t want to know anything about her. I feel as if we’re going to learn it anyway. ^_^

Posted in LGBTQ | 6 Comments »


Summer Reading: The Causal Angel (English)

September 10th, 2017

In May, I reviewed Hannu Rajienmi’s novel The Quantum Thief as a prelude to the rest of my summer reading. We meet and become involved with gentleman thief Jean Le Flambeur, whose escape from prison was a set-up by the woman who sent him there in the first place, his former lover and goddess, Founder Josephine Pellegrini. Set in a Solar System after the Earth has been destroyed, in which virtual and “real” existence are equivalent, wealth is measured in time, and the political forces arrayed against one another are complicated and multi-layered, this book was an absolutely fantastic read.

The second book of the series, The Fractal Prince, shifted the background to the foreground, as Jean becomes less of a focus and his partner-in-need, Mieli’s story starts to step up. Mieli, it turns out was working for The Pelligrini, and has been a double agent in Jeans’ camp since the moment she broke him out of jail. 

Now, as the summer comes to an end, I take a look at the the third book of the series, The Causal Angel. In this volume, all the various Zoku (temporary and permanent groups bonded by need or desire in the virtual realms) find themselves embroiled by Jean and Mieli (working together, but separately,) in a war amongst the technology-based Sobornost and the Founders, for the ability to shape reality itself. The book primarily follows Mieli, as she works her half of the plot developed by Jean to bring down the Founders themselves using the power of the Kaminari Jewel. Mieli navigates multiple virtual realms to gain the jewel but, in the end, won’t turn it over to Jean. When reality is remade, the wish that makes it is pure and unassailable and…most importantly…uncorruptable. Reality will always be corruptable, but that doesn’t mean it has to start that way.

This series was extremely well-written, if what you like is a barrage of new information cannoned at you faster than you can grok it. As it happens, that is exactly what I like. ^_^ Catching up with the story only meant that the story was about to wrap up, not that I was particularly fast on the uptake.

When I reviewed The Fractal Prince, I commented casually that Mieli needed a new girlfriend. Thumbs up, Hannu. Thumbs up.

Ratings:

Story – 10
Characters – 9 all the way around
Lesbian – 10

Overall – 10

If you’re looking for sci-fi that is not at all the usual stuff, with fully-developed characters – both male and female – vast and deep world-building that moves quickly and is compelling, I got your series right here. 

This was a great read and a stellar summer reading series. It would be hard to beat, so my next book is going to have to be something completely different. ^_^

Posted in Novel, Queer Fiction | 2 Comments »