Sunday, January 04, 2026

Bookshelf #11

Here it is, my smuttiest bookshelf! And yes, it's all manga. And most of it is from Seven Seas Entertainment. Is that a coincidence? Perhaps!

A large chunk of it consists of comics from a brief yuri phase, with varying degrees of explicitness and seriousness. These include Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon, a workplace melodrama; NTR: Netsuzou Trap, about high school friends who cheat on their boyfriends with one another; most of Citrus and one volume of its sequel Citrus+, a mostly serious series about the relationship between two school girls who are polar opposites...and also stepsisters and, finally, one volume apiece of The Conditions of Paradise, Bloom Into You, Days of Love at Seagull Villa and Nameless Asterism, none of which I remember much of anything about (Actually, that last one had a fairy complicated crush triangle at its center that seemed intriguing, but, like a lot of manga I sample, I ended up losing track of it immediately). 

The beautifully drawn Stravaganza also has a flirtatious romance of sorts between two women in it but that isn't the focus of the book. Instead, the focus is on a kingdom's masked queen, who sneaks out of her castle to go on adventures. A medieval fantasy, it vacillates between silly comedy and intense action, the story of kingdoms under threat by terrible monsters gradually taking over the narrative. There's also a lot of nudity. I borrowed the first volume from the library and liked it enough to buy the next two...but never bought the now out-of-print first volume, which is why you only see volumes 2 and 3 up there. Pretty much all of the manga series I own are similarly incomplete. 

Next to that? Don't Meddle with My Daughter, a deadpan parody of American superhero comics. Manga-ka Nozomu Tamaki answers the question, what if a superhero comic was made for grown-ups and were permitted to openly indulge in sexual content, rather than just having the comics creators try to sneak their personal fetishes into mainstream narratives based around what were once considered children's characters...? It's not very good (although I did give it three volumes worth of chances!). If a superhero comic for grown-ups with frank discussion and occasional depictions of sex stuff sounds appealing though, I'd recommend Adam Warren's long-running superhero sex comedy Empowered. Don't Meddle is more explicit when it comes to nudity, but, as I said, it's not very good, while Empowered is pretty excellent. (Or, at least, the volumes of it that I read were all excellent; that's another series I completely lost track of.)

Finally, we have a pair of will they/won't they heterosexual romances set in high school. 

Mari Taiyou's Gal Gohan stars an outgoing high school gyaru/"gal" who various circumstances lead to being the first and only member of a constantly flustered young male Home Ec teacher's new cooking club. Over the course of ten volumes, our gal Miku constantly teases and flusters her handsome teacher, who always gallantly resists any and all temptation, and the two gradually, genuinely bond over the art of cooking...and, of course, fall in love. Though they don't actually get together until after she graduates, I suppose it's a fairly problematic story given the power dynamic and the valid perception of grooming—even though Taiyou always has Miku as the aggressor and her teacher denying her—but I found it engaging enough to read the whole thing. At ten volumes, it's a pretty perfect length for this kind of romance, being long enough to be substantial and display the characters' feelings occurring to them and deepening over time but not going on so long that it's obvious the creator is erecting roadblocks just to keep the series going.

Finally, on the far right is Don' Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro, starring serious, studious, shy and introverted art clubber Naoto Hachiouji and his junior, first-year student Hayase Nagatoro, who presents herself as loud, confident, aggressive and more sexually experienced and worldly than the boy she calls "Senpai" (even if it's all a bit of a front). It starts out as a sort of oil-and-water affair, Nagatoro mercilessly teasing Hachiouji at every opportunity, but, the more time they spend together, the clearer it becomes they have genuine feelings for one another, although these are almost always masked by falling into their original teasing dynamic. 

I read the first 11 volumes and then switched to borrowing it from the library. I really like the way it looks on the shelf, thanks to the varying colors of the spines, which I feel is relatively rare among manga collections these days, as they tend to favor a uniform trade dress and thus stick to a single color scheme. 

Unfortunately, the library system's purchasing of the series grew a little erratic, and they missed a few volumes, so I haven't read any new ones for a bit and then forgot exactly where I left off with it. Checking Amazon, it seems like they're up to volume 20 now. Perhaps it's just as well; this is a case in which the series has kept going long, long after it was clear the characters liked one another and that each knew the other liked them, but artificial circumstances keep getting introduced to keep them from becoming a couple, here in the form of a kiss bet which requires each character to accomplish a big goal in their lives. 

Oh, and you might also notice a few random prose books lying atop the shelf, there because I didn't have anywhere else to put them (all the space on my actual bookshelves is devoted to comics). These are Our Angry Eden: Faith and Hope on a Hotter, Harsher Planet, David Williams' book about the climate crisis and how Christians could and should address it; The Big Book of Japanese Giant Monster Movies: The Lost Films, John LeMay's book about dozens of intriguing-sounding monster movies that were planned or started but were never actually made; and Betty and Veronica: The Leading Ladies of Riverdale, Tim Hanley's extremely readable book about the two female points of comics' most famous love triangle (I recently read and wrote about this last book, by the way, and plan to post my review here sooner or later).

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