Boys Next Door Reviews

Rating: ♦♦♦♦

There isn’t much I can say about this series aside from the fact that it’s damn cute. It really is. Even with all of the impossible situations the characters find themselves in and the violence that surrounds them, it still manages to be cute as hell. I don’t think I would like it as much as I do if it wasn’t so freaking cute. I mean, there’s really not much too it, if you want to boil it down to the basic plot.

A young guy, Ewon, gets blackmailed into working for his ex-lover’s boyfriend, who just happens to be the head of an organized crime syndicate. There are also the wacky situations that evolve from being part of an organized crime syndicate. But, then when you throw in the romantic tension between our hapless hero and his miserable boss, you start to get something that’s rather special. Add in the other partners in crime and the mayhem they’re capable of, and the whole thing starts to get really enjoyable.

This time, big-boss man, Mookul, has a distant memory surrounding a person from his childhood that reminds him of Ewon. Could it be that Ewon is part of what shaped Mookul into the man he is today? Does this bode well for Ewon, who has spent most of his employment either lusting after Mookul or cowering in fear?

It’s light fluff, it’s happy fluff, but it keeps me entertained and makes me smile to read it. I really can’t ask for much more in a release.

Net Comics does a very good job of picking releases, at least in the Boys Love genre, that I just want to keep reading. Maybe they’re slipping crack in the ink or something. Whatever it is, I’m going to follow them to see what else they’re going to bring over from Korea for me to enjoy.

Rating: ♦♦♦♦♦

I have been waiting for this. More lovely, sexy angst with boys dressed in futuristic fantasy outfits.

When we last left our heroes, Minami and Sawada slept together. We were left wondering what was going to become of their relationship after Sawada gave Minami the cold shoulder after the night of fun. The two actors can still work together, but the negative emotions they feel towards each other come out in their acting. Good thing that their characters are archenemies.

After Minami goes through some more emotional upheaval at the hands of Sawada, he finds comfort in the arms of another costar, Katagiri. Katagiri isn’t exactly the person that Minami wants to sleep with, but Katagiri makes a good substitute since Sawada is unavailable.

As the story progresses, we get to see a bit into Sawada’s back story and that he was dumped horribly by a fellow actor who resembles Minami. Hmmm. Maybe there was more to Sawada saying that Minami wasn’t his type than he was letting on.

Things really get interesting when that fellow actor is brought in to play a guest role for a special on the series they’re working on. Instead of a love triangle, we’re looking at a square. Things get very messy very quickly.

I’m still hoping that Sawada and Minami get their heads out of their asses to figure out that they’re supposed to be banging each others’ brains out. Let the other two get together and go off into the happy yaoi-land sunset.

I can’t say that Makoto Tateno is my favorite artist. I like the style of a few other artists more, but, damn, if Tateno pulls off some of the best goddamned angst out there. Every time I sit down with one of her releases, I get sucked right in and end up caring far too much about her characters!

Rating: ♦♦♦

I’m very much surprised by how much I enjoyed this release. It’s a trite and cliched plot that I’ve seen over and over again, but it’s still a fun read. Oh, let’s not forget that it’s well drawn and cute as hell. Both are definite factors in whether or not I’m going to like a release.

Ryoichi is picking up some extra money by working at a male brothel. Sakura comes in one night and buys some time with Ryoichi. A connection is made. The boys find themselves slowly being fascinated with each other. Soon they find themselves so twined together that they’re better together than they are apart. The conflict is fairly obvious, given that one character is a straight-laced school teacher and the other one is a prostitute, but it still manages to work without making me want to scream in frustration.

There’s really nothing new and different in this book that makes it stand out from other releases that cover the same ground, but I still liked it. Deux did a very good job with presentation and translation. It’s just hard to find good things to say about content that I’ve seen before.

It is fun and if this is a plot cliche that you enjoy, I think you’re going to find a lot to like in this release. However, if you’ve gotten sick of pretty-boy prostitutes with hearts of gold and cold men who let their hearts melt when they get together, I would definitely avoid this one.

Rating: ♦♦♦♦♦

It’s back! Oh, my sweet crack, how I have missed you! I’m going to be a very sad little fangirl when this series is over and I won’t have it to look forward to anymore. I have a rule for myself. I’m not allowed to add manga to my bookshelves until I’ve reviewed it for the site. If I didn’t have this rule, no reviews would get done because I would just sit and read manga all day.

I got a box from Amazon yesterday containing this volume. Now, before this box arrived, I had a stack of manga that I had read that I’m supposed to be reviewing for this week. Yeah, that didn’t happen. Love Pistols trumps anything else that might come in.

Anyway, in this volume we break away from the main characters to get the story of Seth and Haigashira. As is the norm for this series, we have a fairly angsty story with a happy ending. Both Seth and Haigashira are legendary. Their breeds are not even supposed to exist anymore. Haigashira is a bat and Seth is what is known as a winged lord - his true soul is a bird of prey.

Okay, that’s just fine. Now, here’s where it starts to get weird. In the grand Love Pistols tradition, Haigashira was raised to not let anyone know that he is really a bat. One of the things he did try to fit in yet still hide his difference was to let heavyweights experiment on him. Before they came up with the womb worm, they had all kinds of different creams and pills - some of which would turn male bits into female bits.

So, Haigashira is a male with girl bits. Trust me, this makes sense in the context of the story, even if it does sound completely crazy now. It gets even better, though. Seth is the prince of a Saudi Arabian tribe. He kidnaps Haigashira and brings him to Saudi Arabia to be one of his wives in his harem. Understandably, Haigashira isn’t too pleased with this turn of events. He may love Seth, but he didn’t sign up to be taken out of his homeland and impregnated!

Looking at this series, I really shouldn’t like it as much as I do. Nothing makes sense! It goes off on these wild flights of fancy. I should be getting cranky with it - not hoping and praying that the next release will come out quickly! Yet, there’s something about the insane story line, sketchy artwork and raw emotions of the characters that just make this series one of my all-time favorites.

Rating: ♦♦

I want to like this story. It has a lot of elements that I really enjoy. In fact, if it didn’t venture off into the land of wrong and fail so often, I think that I would have really enjoyed it. That being said, I was highly disappointed in this release. I was tempted to throw the book across the room in disgust more than once.

The story revolves around Shiina, a high school student with issues. His family ignores him in favor of his younger brother, so he’s a walking pit of despair and loneliness. To relieve some of his loneliness, he’s taken to sleeping with an older woman. She fills his wallet after every rendezvous, but money isn’t his motivation. He just wants someone to care for him for a little while.

One evening after meeting with the woman, Shiina runs into a teacher from his school at the train station. Before we knows it, Shiina is getting taken by force in the bathroom of the train station. He ends up enjoying, and later craving, the teacher’s contact, but it was forced just the same.

Now, I know that being forced into pleasure is a standard of this genre, so I don’t even bat an eye at it anymore. No, what really made me cranky was the treatment of Shiina by the teacher in the latter part of the book.

The teacher steals all of Shiina’s money, so that Shiina has no choice but to come to him for food. The teacher smacks Shiina across the face in a public restaurant after Shiina says no to him. All the while, Shiina’s bleating about how much he loves this asshole!

Sorry, but that kind of shit brings out my inner femma-nazi and makes her go ballistic!

Naono Bohra did a great story that featured the few elements that I did like in this story. It revolved around a young man who was on the run from his abusive and indifferent family. He was also a pit of despair and loneliness. He thought that the scars from his beatings rendered him ugly. He met an older man who took him under his wing, helped him to heal emotionally and then loved him to pieces.

Sadly, Matsuda can’t craft a story the way Bohra can, and her sadistic seme and wimpy uke left me feeling vaguely disgusted.

Rating: ♦♦♦♦♦

You don’t even know how excited I am to be able to hold a copy of this in my hot little hands. This is it! The book that inspired what in my opinion is the best BL OAV ever made. Every time I watch a BL OAV, I compare it to Ai No Kusabi and always find the others to be lacking. Sorry, unless you have me crying my eyes out for the last half of the thing, there’s just no way it can compare.

That being said, I hope people are not looking for a version of the OAV in book form. The OAV fills in the holes in the three years that Riki was with Iason. The book concentrates on what happens once Riki returns to the slums and Bison.

Have I confused you yet? I guess I’m assuming that most of you have seen the OAV and know all the salient plot points.

For those of you who have been living under a rock and haven’t seen this yet, Ai no Kusabi revolves around a futuristic society. Riki comes from the slums. He was the pet of one of the highest ranking members of society, a Blondie, Iason Mink. After three years of being Iason’s pet, Riki returns to the slums to try and reclaim who he was before Iason came into his life.

I’m really super-simplifying this, but if you haven’t seen the OAV yet, go out and do so.

The book isn’t the easiest to read. The translation, while good, seems a bit stiff and formal at times. Then, there are times when it rushes off into purple prose a la Storm Constantine. Stick with it. The story is good enough that you will be well rewarded when you’re done.

The back of the book reads that the next part of the series will be out in Spring 2008. I just hope I can wait that long!

Rating: ♦♦♦♦

As much as I really want to enjoy this release, I do have to admit that it’s not the easiest book in the world to read. I’m getting through it because I’ve seen the OAV enough times to have the story imprinted into my brain. I know the characters; I know their back-stories. So, I kind of have a clue what’s going on in the novel and what’s going to happen. I don’t know if I would be able to get through it if I didn’t have the crutch of the OAV.

Language difficulties aside, it’s a neat story. In this volume, we are introduced to Katze. Katze has always been one of my favorite characters. In some ways, he’s kind of a tragic figure. In other ways, he’s just a puppet having his strings pulled by the Blondies. However, even as a puppet, he never stops being his own person.

I can see why the novels were popular enough to be made into an OAV, but I’m not sure how well they hold up to being translated into English. Once you become accustomed to the formal, stilted language, it’s fairly readable. The first few chapters, while you’re getting used to it, though, are slow going.

I don’t know if there is a solution to the translation problem, but I definitely want June to keep bringing over novels. I think it’s just something I’m going to have to get used to when I’m reading their rendering of the novels.

Or, maybe I’m just complaining too much and I should just shut up and enjoy Ai no Kusabi in any format I can get my hands on!

Rating: ♦♦♦♦♦

Edit: For those of us who have been living under a rock for the past year or so, Iris Print crashed and burned, leaving this fantastic title to be picked up and re-released by Lethe Press. The quality of the book is unchanged, so we’re not going to re-write the review. Just ignore all of our babbling about Iris Print. We have corrected the Amazon.com link above, so it points to the Lethe Press version of the book.

For those of us who don’t know, Iris Print is going to be releasing original BL novels and compilations. These are not just translations of Japanese novels, these are brand spanking new stories.

For the first release that the company is doing, A Strong and Sudden Thaw is a very strong piece of work. It’s got all the angst and dramatic elements that made me fall in love with the genre in the first place, but is a truly unique story.

It revolves around a futuristic world, where wars and pollution have brought upon another ice age. There’s no electricity, no public transportation, nothing. If you want something, you have to do it yourself or pay someone to do it for you. The past where there was electricity and the weather was warm is only a distant memory, only remembered by the most aged people.

David’s grandmother remembers the warm and she tells her grandchildren about life before the ice and the snow. There have been rumors flying around that dragons have been spotted up in the hills. They’ve even gone so far as to kill one girl who wasn’t properly supervised.

Add into this mix a pretty new healer with a gift of making people feel at ease. David is drawn to the healer like a moth to a flame and the healer’s willingness to share books with David cements an instant friendship.

Problem is that with the ice and the snow a lot of prejudice came flooding back into the U.S. People needed someone or something to blame for the ice and the cold. When leaders began telling people that all the cold was punishment for allowing people to live as they chose, people believed it.

So, yes, we’re back to the days where any and all homosexual acts are referred to as sodomy and sodomy is a great big no-no. Death is the main sentence for convicted sodomites, but sometimes, if people are feeling lenient, they will let them off with being whipped and then banished.

So not only do David and his would-be-lover have to deal with society’s prejudice and the chance that they could be caught together at any time, there’s still the problem of those pesky dragons. And how in the hell did they get there in the first place? Are they just a mutation? Were they breed by the government? How in the hell do you get rid of a dragon?

If this is the quality of book that Iris Print is going to be releasing, color me a happy girl and sign me up to get anything and everything they release. Yes, the book had some slow points and I thought that they were beating a dead horse at times with the whole OMG! society’s prejudices are bad bits, but these elements didn’t stop me from completely enjoying the book.

Here’s to hoping that there’s going to be more quality work like this coming from Iris Print.

Rating: ♦♦♦♦♦

Excuse me for a few moments while I fangirl to myself. This is a story that I have been in love with ever since Camilla posted the first rough draft in her journal. It was a story that I saved on my computer and would pull up to read every time I felt like crap about myself, my looks and my place in the world. Now that I have it in print format, I could not be a happier girl.

As the back of the book says, this is Pretty Woman done with boys. We have Xavier, a young lawyer, who is leading a normal life with a pretty fiancee, yet yearns for the shockingly sexy beast of a male prostitute who comes to service his boss every Wednesday.

Finally, Xavier musters up the courage to hire the prostitute himself, just to purge the longing from his system. Of course we all know that the prostitute has a heart of gold and that once Xavier has gotten a taste of his beast, purging him from his system is not going to be quite as easy as he suspected.

Camilla’s prose is rich and lush, in the grand purple prose tradition of writers like Storm Constantine. Liv’s illustrations perfectly amplify the emotions in the text. This is not a book for the faint of heart, no, this title is ’shove your hand into your panties’ dirty, with all of the details lovingly depicted. It’s a sweet little gem of a book. Don’t let the fact that it’s being released by a private printer stop you from giving it a try. This one is not to be missed!

Rating: ♦♦♦♦

Welcome to Japan! The world of the self-lubricating anus and uke-boys who are gagging for it. In case you couldn’t guess, this is a smutty book. So smutty that the only the plot is there for is to move you from sex scene to sex scene. That’s not to say that it’s not fun in its own incredibly filthy, physically impossible way, but you should be warned going in.

Kane is known as the ‘Cool Beauty’ at school, he’s friends with the boy who’s known for being a womanizer and a jerk, Yuichi. One day, when Yuichi is bemoaning his lack of sex, Kanae offers himself as a replacement. Much to Kanae’s surprise, Yuichi accepts and wild, hot monkey sex ensues.

However, Kanae’s been keeping something a secret from everyone, even Yuichi. Kanae’s not as experienced as he lets everyone think he is. In fact, he was as pure as the driven snow when Yuichi took him. Now Kanae’s falling for Yuichi and worrying that Yuichi is going to go back to his womanizing ways.

This is not great literature. This isn’t even high-quality literature. This is pure smut that you read and groan at the improbability of it all, but you keep reading because it’s hot. We’re all allowed a few guilty pleasures. Stories like this, with no other redeeming value, are going to be one of mine.

Rating: ♦♦♦

I know going into these releases, that the translation is not going to be the highest quality. That being said, I was pleasantly surprised at the readability of this release. That’s not to say that it was perfect, but it’s good enough for me to read and enjoy without wanting to throw the book across the room in a fit of annoyance.

So, we have our uke, Tsukasa. He’s a low-level office worker who has really lousy taste in men. First, we find out that he was screwing his boss, then his boss who promptly dumped him to get engaged to the granddaughter of the president of the company. To add insult to injury, his old lover/boss/general-asshole taunts him about being frigid when it comes to anal sex.

Of course, this being Japan, the land of the magical uke, every gay boy has a self-lubricating anus. Also, all ukes must be multi-orgasmic when it comes to their asses. But, I digress…

Anyway, Tsukasa is drowning his sorrows at a bar when he receives an invitation from a mysterious stranger. An invitation to a hotel room. Tsukasa almost doesn’t go, but the stranger is so good looking that Tsukasa finds it hard to resist.

Up to the hotel room Tsukasa goes. There Tsukasa finds out that he’s really not frigid. He just needs to find that special seme with a cock that has magical powers before he can enjoy being pounded into the mattress.

Now, Mr. Seme won’t tell Tsukasa his name, but does ask him to meet again next week. So, they go along, having mind-blowing sex once a week. However, Tsukasa finds himself falling deeper and deeper for his mystery man. Imagine the shock when Tsukasa finds out that his new boss at work is the mystery man.

Lots of angst, doubts and graphic, raunchy sex follow, making this for a pretty fun read. I find these books to be like candy, not too much substance, but, damn, do they taste good!