Manga

Always the sign of a good scanlation group when it bothers to explain things like this on their credits page:

Tayutau Futari (translated here as A Couple Drifting in the Wind) is a girls’ love/yuri series with a simple premise: hot woman is hotter if she smokes. That’s certainly what first year college photography student Fujino Kaori thinks when she first meets Momochi. Kaori’s berating her lack of friends and exciting youthful college life when she falls asleep on a bench in the college grounds. When she wakes up it’s because Momochi, or Momo, a tattooed second year art student just back from a year traveling around Japan sits down next to her. It’s not hard to see why Kaori immediately fancies her and wants to take her picture.

Handsome, butch and with an unconventional attitude — girls are not supposed to smoke in Japan — Momo looks to be everything Kaori might wish she was as well. By the third chapter they’ve decided to be room mates, by the fifth Mom is comfortable enough around Kaori to walk around naked in their apartment, to the latter’s deligh^wdiscomfort. And in each chapter Puebro (a pseudonym referencing the Pueblo cigarette brand) hides a homage to a famous painting. Sometimes, like the one from chapter one above are easy to recognise as references, some, like the Vermeer one in chapter two, are more hidden. Kudos to Sappho Scans for always recognising and explaining them.

By chapter six things get a bit more complicated as the girl above, Setsuna, aspirant Youtube streamer, joins the cast. Like Kaori she’s infatuated (to the point of stalking) with Momo, but once she learns of her relationship with Kaori she ships them immediately. The second volume of Tayutau Futari opens with ehr introducing herself to Momo and Kaori and it seems some hijinks are imminent, but sadly Sappho Scans stopped their scanlation with chapter eight. Their reason? Seven Seas will release the series in English. That will be in December, so reserve your copies now.

A brilliant use of the comic page as a physical entity here, courtesy of Uno Zinnia’s Mokuyobi no Ice Cream.

Mokuyobi no Ice Cream is an anthology of single chapter yuri infused stories. Chapter four, ‘Platform’ is told by a girl who calls herself a coward and a bystander, somebody nobody notices. At first it looks as if the girl we follow through the preceding pages is this narrator. She falls down on the subway platform and another girl holds out her hand to help her stand up. But thent he fallen girl gets closer and closer to the camera, we get the page above and then the glorious reveal:

What looked like a panel on a comic page is revealed to be a paper bag covering the actual narrator’s face. The sort of thing you really can only do in comics and which utterly depends on having that reveal hidden until you turn the page (or, in this case, click through).

Every serious reader or collector will have wondered at some point about what will happen with their books after they die. Hon nara Uru hodo‘s first chapter is about the worst case scenario.

Hon nara Uru hodo is about a secondhand bookseller. In the first chapter, after his store has been introduced, he’s called by a local estate agent to the house of a recently deceased man, who turns out to have been a serious reader and collector. As the chapter title has it, the protagonist is there to deliver “the last rites of books”.

In 2023 I moved back to my hometown from Amsterdam, where I’d lived for the best part of thirty years. Partially this was to be closer to my family, the majority of which still lived there. A large part of it was also the ability to move into a bigger house. My small one bedroom flat was being choked with books, comics and other nerdy stuff. In my new house I could actually use one of the bedrooms as a library, have the attic to store all my floppies and other stuff and still have a room left over to use as an office (which houses most of my non-fiction books). Which meant I could actually have a living room without book cases in it. (Still got some gardening and cooking books living on shelves in the kitchen though). But yeah, this does means that once I die, whoever inherits it all will see themselves confronted with something like this:

Hon nara Uru hodo then starts slightly melancholy, but also with a little bit of a cynical undertone to it. If you’re a big reader or collector, you probably will have dreamt of having your own bookstore at one point, because what’s a better occupation for a book lover? The reality of course is that a lot of secondhand books are unsellable, unreadable thrash, either because of what they are or the condition they’re in. You need to be hardheaded as a bookseller or you won’t survive. Despite this cynical undertone, the love for books and bookselling shines through. I love this sort of manga, where the mangaka is clearly writing about their own passions and interests and the joy of the subject shines through.

These are all perfectly normal things to think of as a perfectly normal girl, right, no hidden gender stuff here!

Zach no Koi is a manga by Arashiyama Nori about a vampire who fell in love with a girl one night and who has returned to her — only to find out that was sixty years ago and she’s now a grandmother living with her two granddaughters. The girl in the page above is one of these granddaughters, Yumeko, who actually helped Zach the vampire be reunited with her grandmother Tsumugi. Most of the manga of course is about the rekindling of the relationship between Zach and Tsumugi, but chapter three focuses on Yumeko, who asks Zach to make her a vampire too, because “now us the cutest I’ll ever be”. The chapter actually opens with a flashback to when Yumeko and her sister Himari first came to live with their grandmother, the latter telling them that “while you’re at granny’s place, I want you to be the version of yourself you like the most”.

All of which made sense when I read this page, as Yumeko is slightly depressing leaving her friends behind and wondering if she can stay positive about herself as she will grow out of being able to wear the right clothes and ‘girly rings’. Clearly the author here is heavily hinting that she’s trans, right?

I like how well it’s done. You’re prepped by the flashback, but on its own it’s just about a granny making her grandchildren feel welcome. Yumeko asking to be turned too is a clue, but she also could be just a girl wanting to stay cute forever. Then, in just three pages, it becomes undeniable that Yumeko is trans without the author ever having to spell it out. These are not the thoughts of a cis girl. And to drive it home, the pretend vampire woman Youtuber that inspired Yumeko to become one too, is revealed to actually be a young boy using computer trickery to make himself a woman on screen. If you ever want to introduce a character as trans while keeping it subtle, these three pages are a great example of how to do so.