2008 in review: manga

[meganbmoore]

A complete list of the manga I read in 2008 is here in poll form.

Here are the stats:

404 total volumes
105 series/one-shots
71 new series, complete, abandoned partway through, still reading, etc.
9 single volume series/short story collections

This does not include scanslations I read of books that I’ll get when the licensed volumes come out.

Of

Comments

[meganbmoore]

Yeah...that's basically what I was trying to say. It gets grouped in because it has gay characters, not because of the story itself.

[smillaraaq]

Well, it has gay and bi characters, plus the mangaka's OTHER work is something like 75% BL; that seems to be a big factor in the marketing and labeling decisions on the US side. (Remember my head-scratching over Wild Butterfly, the anthology that only had one overt BL story in it but was packaged and marketed like it was something straight out of Chara or BeXBoy

[meganbmoore]

or the average Pushy Alpha Bastard Romantic Lead.

I think the only ones who vaguely fit into that that I can stand are Kyo in SDK and Shuri in Basara. And in both of those, it's canon that the girls start punching when that starts up, and there's never the feeling that either guy actually means it. Kyo is basically an adolescent in certain regards, and it reads like pigtail pulling on the playground. Shuri's never actually been turned down before, and is used to being pursued, but underatands "no" perfectly well once he understands that it's being said.

[smillaraaq]

*nod* Those elements make a big, big difference in how much I can tolerate that sort, too. Dorian from Eroica is a bit of that predatory-seme, doesn't-know-the-meaning-of-"no" type in the earliest volumes, back when the annoying Plucky Teens are still in the story, but that's tempered once Klaus comes onto the scene. For all his occaional moments of flustered panic at Dorian's endless flirtations, Klaus is bigger and more physically threatening than Dorian, and usually doesn't forget it; he's quite willing to lash out with words or fists when pushed too far.

(There are also bits of canon that make it seem all the more likely that Dorian, for all his big talk, might not be inclined to dub-con pursuits that go much further physically than a stolen kiss or quick grope, and that he considers boys younger than the barely-legal Caesar Gabriel off-limits even if they're willing; but I'm pretty sure both those bits come up in later volumes than the one you've seen so far, so I can't say more without spoilers.)

[meganbmoore]

*nods*

I wouldn't have finished the first volume if I hadn't been assured that Caesar went away and never came back. (His friends weren't so bad, but they also weren't incredibly great.)

Sadly, my reading past Vol 2 has to wait for Rightstuf to have another CMX sale (and to see how things go with insurance and the psychologist) as that was one series they didn't have any of in stock for their warehouse clearance sale (or whatever they were calling it.)

[smillaraaq]

I think Caesar gets a token farewell appearance in 2, but have no fear, it's a very brief throwaway snippet of just a few pages in the midst of all the espionage/art-theft hijinks. Aoike-sensei seems to have just sort of thrown that in as a nod to gracefully writing out the originally-planned Plucky Teen protagonists, now that the original antagonist and his new foil have run away with the story.