Newby
Hi there! Just found your most excellent community, and I wondered whether you might be the very people to help me? A dear friend gave me a copy of From Eroica With Love Book 1 a few years ago, which I loved, and then last week I had the great good fortune to find Books 2-10. I duly pounced on them, and mainlined them, and am now brimming with fannish adoration - which has been only partially slaked by devouring fanfic.
Encouraged by this book, I've dipped my toes into the waters of Manga and tried a few other titles - and there are a couple I quite like, but I confess I'm not loving the artwork.
Aioke's artwork is GORGEOUS, imho. Her use of line, colour, space and finely textured detail (an embroidered hem here, a complicated bit of wallpaper there) recalls classical Japanese art and is just as great a component of the pleasure I derive from the books as the dialogue (which, in translation, is a bit wobbly at times) or the characters. I like it infinitely more than the sketchy, iconic, slipshod artwork that seems more common in Manga (from my painfully unknowledgable point of view).
(I also love the fact that Dorian and Klaus are both competent grownups with their own jobs, rather than skinny, lovestruck teenage boys and/or some kind of Master/Padawan chan thing. Because that's not so much My Beautiful Cake, on the whole.)
So - I'd relish more of her work - and I understand that she's worked on quite a number of other titles, but I don't know that they're available in translation? 'Cause my Japanese doesn't extend beyond being able to count to five - and that's phonetically, not in writing! Failing that, would any of you good souls possibly be able to point a girl to other writer/artists of a similar style and/or calibre?
Encouraged by this book, I've dipped my toes into the waters of Manga and tried a few other titles - and there are a couple I quite like, but I confess I'm not loving the artwork.
Aioke's artwork is GORGEOUS, imho. Her use of line, colour, space and finely textured detail (an embroidered hem here, a complicated bit of wallpaper there) recalls classical Japanese art and is just as great a component of the pleasure I derive from the books as the dialogue (which, in translation, is a bit wobbly at times) or the characters. I like it infinitely more than the sketchy, iconic, slipshod artwork that seems more common in Manga (from my painfully unknowledgable point of view).
(I also love the fact that Dorian and Klaus are both competent grownups with their own jobs, rather than skinny, lovestruck teenage boys and/or some kind of Master/Padawan chan thing. Because that's not so much My Beautiful Cake, on the whole.)
So - I'd relish more of her work - and I understand that she's worked on quite a number of other titles, but I don't know that they're available in translation? 'Cause my Japanese doesn't extend beyond being able to count to five - and that's phonetically, not in writing! Failing that, would any of you good souls possibly be able to point a girl to other writer/artists of a similar style and/or calibre?