|
I’ll admit it, I was surprised when I saw these put up for sale. It wasn’t that the subject matter itself that surprised me – manga is huge in American now, and that goes for ero-manga as well – but rather that someone was selling it at all. While perhaps it’s unfair to the creators and publishers, there’s a fairly huge number of groups who scanlate these and put them up for free online. Given that, a company that legally sells them over the internet, rather than just illegally distributing them under the radar, made me blink.
Of course, it’s not as though Icarus is asking for an arm and a leg here. This, the first issue of Comic AG Digital (not counting Issue 00), only costs $0.50, and that’s for over a hundred pages of material. As an anthology collection, this has five unrelated erotic manga by different artists, translated into English. Unfortunately, while the manga in this issue are all independent of each other, they’re all independent of the manga in other issues of Comic AG Digital, also. This is a shame, since it would have been easy for them to string together some of the hentai mini-series throughout various issues as a selling point. Issue 00, for example, had the first chapter of “A Wish of My Sister,” a story with something like eight chapters. Given how 00 was a free issue, it would have been a sensible move for them to put the second chapter in this, Issue 01, to entice people to buy it and find out what happens next.
Icarus Publishing seems fairly proud of the cover to these magazines, making a point of noting them along with the component manga. However, I found myself less than enamored of this particular cover. While I appreciate the art, and the use of color (rarely seen in manga, unlike American comics), I didn’t like the proportions of the girl depicted. Big breasts are something I enjoy, but when they’re so big squeezing them contorts them into odd shapes, that’s going a bit beyond what I enjoy.
Past the cover is the credits page, and there were some things here that both confused and amused me. For one thing, it seems that Comic AG Digital was posted somewhere else first, because there are a few notices on the credits page that talk about how clicking on the ads help keep this publication free…which it isn’t. It also mentions that all users can redistribute this file, so long as it’s not done for profit, and nothing is altered. To be fair, it also does ask you to purchase legitimate releases from the creators, for their sake, but that message seems like it’ll be lost after the other two.
What tickled me most, however, was the declaration of how all the characters appearing in sexual situations are age 18 or older. That’s a disclaimer that’s not only totally unnecessary, but laughable. It’s unnecessary because everything in this product is just artwork – digital images of ink on paper – and so there’s no reason to worry about how old they appear. While I admit that I’m no lawyer, my understanding of current U.S. law is that (unless they’re drawn so realistically as to be impossible to distinguish from real people) images are perfectly free to depict characters of any age engaged in any sort of act. On that note, the reason this disclaimer is also laughable is that several of the characters in these manga are pretty clearly younger than eighteen. There aren’t any prepubescent characters, to be sure, but judging by how old they look (as well as their surroundings, and other minor clues) several of these characters are teenagers maybe a year or two shy of being eighteen.
So, beyond all that, what are the actual manga like? Well, before getting into the specifics, let’s go over some of the general details common to them all. The original formatting has been preserved, meaning that you read right-to-left, instead of left-to-right. Aspects of Japanese with subtler nuances, such as suffixes after names and terms such as “oneechan” or “oniichan,” have been kept here. Luckily, for those who are less than familiar with such things, at the end of the PDF there’s a page going over those parts of Japanese and what they mean, serving as a handy guide.
Of course, there were some other aspects of the book that I thought could have been handled better also. Specifically, the sound effects are left in their original Japanese writing, instead of having been translated. This isn’t a major setback, and most readers will probably look over them without really seeing them, but it is still a point that could have been handled better. Most readers won’t even be able to read the sound effect “karan karan” when a character in the background rings a bell, since it’s still in the original katakana, let alone know that it’s supposed to be “ring ring.” Only the context of the illustration (that the sound effect is written next to a character waving a bell around) will possibly clue people in.
Beyond that, there are the technical details of the PDF itself. The PDF has bookmarks to the beginning of each of the publication’s manga, which is a nice touch. There are roughly four pages of ads between each manga in the book, however, which means that you’ll get around twenty pages of ads altogether, or about one-sixth of the book. Beyond that, the only thing I can think of to note is that the PDF format is a bit of a change from the usual method of digital comic distribution (or at least, the one I’m used to). While PDFs can have their screen-size altered, most people have them fit to the page width. This means that you won’t be seeing an entire page on screen at a time, which can be a bit irritating, since you may want your hands to be mostly free for, erm…other things. Usually, comics are a bundle of single image files; one for each page. Of course, as I said, you can alter how much of the PDF is onscreen at a time, so perhaps this isn’t really worth mentioning.
Having properly pontificated on all of that, what are the actual manga themselves like? Let’s go over them.
The first one is “Glow with Sunflower” by Erect Sawaru, the same artist who did the cover image. In this, a girl is upset that her (male) childhood friend doesn’t seem to notice her. Frustrated and thinking that she’s losing him, she makes an advance on him at a local festival, and they end up having sex in the woods near a park. The plot here is fairly thin, with the characters having just enough exposition to get us to the sex, and then cutting away almost everything else besides that. The proportions of the characters are what you’d expect from the artist who did this cover; though it’s not quite as over the top. That said, this was still a good manga – it just had nothing that particularly made it noteworthy.
The second manga, “Misato” is a little more out there. Two female officers are escorting an employee from a perfume company to his corporate headquarters while he delivers a knew perfume that was just perfected. One of the lady officers (the eponymous Misato) accompanies him into the building, where for no particular reason he sprays her with something that drains her strength away, and he rapes her, leaving her bound with her own handcuffs for a few other employees in his building, who don’t hesitate to take advantage of her. It should be noted that this confirms to most ero-manga standards of “rape” in that while Misato shouts for them to stop, she doesn’t do anything to actually try and stop them (though to be fair, she is handcuffed and under the effects of whatever she was gassed with), and beyond that, starts to enjoy her own rape about halfway through, to the point where she starts encouraging them before they finish with her. It’s worth noting that this is the only manga here that ends with a “to be continued” message…hopefully we’ll find out more about Misato’s fate in further issues.
“Ouroboros” is the third manga, and is somewhat darker. This manga starts in medias res, where a brother is raping his older sister. While this happens, the sister reflects on how, jealous of her younger sibling getting more attention from their parents, she teased and picked on him while he was little, and how as he grew, he began to hate her in return, and that that eventually crossed the line into his sexually assaulting her. Of course, what I said before about women being raped in ero-manga holds true here too, as the sister cries out for it to stop, but doesn’t try and fight him off, and thoroughly enjoys his treatment of her.
I was less enamored of this manga than the ones before it, not because of the particulars of the story, but mostly for its artwork. This particular artist is quicker to eschew backgrounds in the bulk of the panels, focused exclusively on the characters being depicted. The art also seems to use a greater number of lines, with thinner borders between things, giving it what I felt was a slightly “messy” feel to the art.
“Marshmallow Honeymoon” is something of the opposite of the previous manga. In this one, a little sister seduces her older brother, throwing her sexy self at him until he can’t say no. While they’re doing it, the brother’s thoughts flashback to how she originally seduced him, and that while he feels guilty about committing incest with her, that doesn’t stop him from giving in every time. The artwork here was similar to the previous manga, though it didn’t focus quite so much on dark lines, and paid slightly more attention to background, giving it a more clean feeling in terms of the art construction.
The last manga requires a bit of explanation in regards to its title. The title given in the manga itself is “Travel and Love.” However, the title given as a bookmark is the more-correct “Travel and Love(ru).” Before anyone asks, this has nothing to do with the “To Love-ru” anime, save that it’s making the same phonetic joke. While a bit hard to understand, the title’s joke is that it’s literally “Toraberu Toraburu,” the English words “Travel Trouble” spelled out phonetically in Japanese. The joke is that if you break down the second word “toraburu,” into pieces, it becomes “to rabu ru,” where “to” is Japanese for “and” and “rabu” is the phoneticized English word “love,” with “ru” just being left over. In that way “Travel Trouble” becomes “Travel and Love(ru).”
This last manga is by Yamatogawa, an artist that I’m something of a fan of. The plot is that a girl is upset that her boyfriend is so timid with her. The couple happens to win a beachside vacation for two, and the girl is even more frustrated when she notices him ogling some busty foreign girls. Finally, when her skimpiest swimsuit doesn’t get a reaction out of him, she loses it and forces herself on him…though it’s rather amusing to see that her idea of raping him is to push him onto his back, grab his erection, and have him start sodomizing her. After this, he confesses that he’s just shy because he’s insecure, and doesn’t want to lose her; she gives him the go-ahead to be more aggressive with her, and the two have sex on the beach. The joke is that by the end of it, he’s become so forward with her that she’s wondering if she went too far. I particularly enjoyed this manga not only because it has an art style that I like, with crisp and clean lines and great attention to background, but also because it’s both heartwarming and humorous at the same time. This is what a short, self-contained manga should be like.
Overall, this wasn’t a bad publication, and I liked most of the manga it had pretty well. There were some places where it could have been better in its translations, to say nothing of how a few of the manga themselves seemed a bit shallow in plot and characterization. The lack of any sort of continuing serial was also a missed opportunity, but that’s a minor error as far as that goes. Altogether, this is easily worth the pittance that Icarus Publishing is asking for it, and is a great addition to any ero-manga library.
|
Log In 
