Not much to this, but damn if I’m not looking forward to hearing the new Dir En Grey album. You can find out more at their official site.

Oh, and while I’m at it (and because the above is not a proper video), here’s the uncensored version of ‘Obscure’ (probably NSFW depending on how lame your co-workers / boss might be…) Read the rest of this entry »

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Kaoru Mori has a thing for maids. Not like that, you pervs- she likes drawing them and writing about them. Mori’s maids aren’t the naughty kind either; they are English, Victorian, and very proper. Clad in ankle-length black dresses and fluffy white aprons, these ladies are smart, competent, and very real.

Mori’s first manga to be released in the U.S., the well-received Emma, chronicles the forbidden love between a maid and a gentleman. The series captures Victorian England in breathtaking detail, and the story is heart-wrenching and intimate. Mori’s second manga to be released here (though it was actually written before Emma) is Shirley, another Victorian maid-manga that takes a different tack.

The volume’s first three stories focus on the title character, Shirley Madison. Bennett Cranley is a young female pub owner in search of a reliable maid. She returns home from work one night to find a ragged girl sitting on her stoop. Thirteen-year-old Shirley is answering her ad for a maid. She’s young to work, even in Victorian England, and reticent about her past. Bennett hires her out of pity, but to her delight she finds that Shirley is a hard worker and an excellent cook. But she’s still a kid, and in the second story Bennett finds herself buying Shirley a doll. In the third story Bennett’s crochety aunt visits, only to be on the receiving end of Shirley’s wrath when the aunt insults Bennett. A possible love interest for Bennett shows up in this story as well, but regrettably the potential isn’t pursued.

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Well friends, this may very well be the last edition of Yaoi Menace. I think I found the book that will put me off the genre forever.

Yaoi: Anthology of Boys’ Love Volume 1 from Yaoi Press is a collection of three short stories brought to life by international teams of writers and artists. Also, it sucks. Hard. No, that’s not a good thing.

The first story, The Price of Freedom, is written by Misa Izanaki and drawn by Yishan Studios. It begins when a family of what appear to be less-than-Yeti but more-then-human creatures rescues a young woman and her baby, who are lost in the forest. The child, Aren, is a half-incubus (wings, tail, horns etc.) and grows up with the Yeti family’s son, Kumari. Then one day Aren’s mother announces that they are going back to her family.

We meet Aren again years later, when he is the star attraction of a circus sideshow, where he plays demon to an ‘angel’ (a man who inexplicably has feathered wings, as opposed to Aren’s bat wings). The ‘angel’ happens to be the lover of the sideshow’s owner, and after work they get their kicks raping and humiliating Aren.

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Dororo is a series by the exceptionally talented and prolific Osamu Tezuka, Japan’s ‘Godfather of Manga’. While relatively little-known in America, the manga spawned an anime series, a Sega video game, and, most recently, a series of live-action films. American fans can thank publisher Vertical for finally bringing us the original.

The story begins during Japan’s Warring States period, when a daimyo (a feudal lord) conceives a desire to rule all of Japan. To this end he spends the night in a temple famous for its forty-eight fearful statues of demons. The daimyo pleads with the demons to fulfill his dream. In exchange, he offers them his unborn child. The demons accept, and the resulting baby is a disturbing sight: each of the forty-eight demons has taken a body part for himself, and the child looks like a slug with empty eye sockets. The daimyo’s wife wants to keep the baby, but her husband forces her to place it in a basket and send it floating down the river, Moses-style.

Luckily for the kid, he’s found by a kindly doctor who takes him in and feeds him. After a couple years the child learns to communicate telepathically, and to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ using a sixth sense. Encouraged by this development, the doctor gives him a name- Hyakkimaru- and some prosthetic limbs. As Hyakkimari grows and becomes proficient with his artificial body parts, he becomes a magnet for demons of all kinds, who sense his unnaturalness. Afraid for the doctor, Hyakkimaru sets off into the world to find his fortune (but not before the doctor makes some deadly modifications to his prosthetic limbs).

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If you read my previous ‘Yaoi Menace’ review (on the manga Freefall Romance), you are already familiar with the Three Basic Yaoi Plots. If you haven’t read it, go do so now. I can wait. OK, all finished? Then you’ll know what I mean when I say the first volume of Love Recipe by Kirico Higashizato follows Plot # 3.

Tomonari Ozawa is and has just landed his first job in the big city at a publishing company. He’s ecstatic until he reaches the department he has been assigned: Rose Boy, the firm’s very successful boy’s love magazine. He’s utterly horrified at the prospect, but, in true Japanese style, is still determined to do his best. Thus he begins his career making coffee, answering phones, and replying to fan mail, all under the watchful eyes of his co-workers, every one of whom is a BL fangirl. They’re all enchanted by his adorable looks and sweet personality, and before long Ozawa is being sent to retrieve manuscripts from writers who are pushing the magazine’s deadline. The writers (who are nearly all female) are equally charmed by Ozawa, and he quickly becomes the magazine’s most popular employee.

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In Japan, Natsuo Kirino is a big name. She’s at the forefront of a relatively recent wave of female detective-fiction authors, a prolific novelist and the winner of multiple literary awards.

In 2005, Random House did U.S. readers a favor and released a translated version of Out, a dark, suspenseful tale of four women who work together on the night shift. When one of them accidentally kills her abusive husband, they band together to dispose of the body…and soon come up with a plan to make money by doing it professionally. Darkly comic, twistedly feminist and downright disturbing, Out was a revelation for American lovers of dark fiction.

Grotesque was released the next year. Kirino’s story of a jealous woman and her beautiful sister who is murdered is multilayered, using rotating first-person points-of-view to weave a bizarre, dysfunctional tapestry full of deception.

Random House will be obliging us yet again this July with the release of a third novel by Kirino, The Real World.

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In my life I have found one ironclad rule that it always pays to follow. And that rule is, “Never trust a yaoi fangirl.”

The majority of fangirls have brains so addled by their love of gay sex that they are incapable of discriminating between a good story and a bad one. As long as there are drawings of men getting it on, they are happy.

Unfortunately, one day I misplaced my reason and trusted the word of a known yaoi fangirl. The result was my purchasing Hyouta Fujiyama’s one-volume yaoi manga, Freefall Romance.

Let me explain something for the uninitiated. There are three basic plots for yaoi manga.

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