#alternative comics

An original minicomic about vampyres and angel statues

Set the scene like this: giant phone books full of manga, piled on tables and cardboard stands outside our local Kinokuniya import shop, free for the taking--then, reverse shot to me looking at them with stars in my eyes and a downright indecent expression of draconic covetousness. These were enough comics to effectively bludgeon a CCA censor, and the weighty tomes full of cheap newsprint constituted Young Magazine's gamble for an American market, through a preview of over 20 works. This came with a gimmick: an audience top pick vote, to determine which first issues got a full run. Perfect, I thought. I should review every single one of these first issues, I thought.

Then, inevitably, I actually read them and realized most were underwhelming, not even compellingly bad but just forgettable, the kind of thing I struggle most to write about. Worse, Young Magazine planned to tally the votes not just through their website (where you can read all the comics!) but also through twitter (🚩) where likes and reposts would BOTH be counted (🚩🚩🚩). Any attempts to promote a given comic would compete with the tastes of people placid or warped enough to use a site where 80% of all interactions are with nazis, bots, and nazi bots.

Yet... one story stood out the moment I saw it. I knew at a glance I'd want to give it special attention, despite also intuiting immediately it was doomed in the polls. It's called "Is My Love Strange?" and it's about a girl grappling with her disinterest in boys, in favor of her love for plush toys.

I don't really understand how a comic with this premise found its way into a Seinen magazine--comics aimed at young men. Though, credit where it's due to Young Mag, they've got a huge genre variety in this sampler, including Boys Run The Riot, a story about a young trans man! Still... the style of IMLS? bears less resemblance to even the other queer stories in the magazine than it does to online traumacore art. I've no doubt mangaka Hikari Azuma (on tumblr as @azumahikariworks ) is plugged into the odder side of queer social media culture; the story feels incredibly authentic. It's also gorgeous, delicate, spare, uniform pen lines whose sparing shading leaves the pages mostly blank, like a coloring book. Comics for young men...? the only "young man" in the story dresses in a giant rabbit suit and introduces themself by disavowing being a "human boy" at all!

Needless to say, there was no way in hell this got picked up.

Which is a shame because Azuma is a virtuoso comicker, who treats Moko with a lot of empathy. She spends about a third of the comic's page count just considering Moko's point of view and alienation from human boys and human sexuality, and attraction to stuffed animals. For a shittier author, this could be an excuse to gawk at weirdos, but by the first act climax, when a kid in a big bunny outfit walks unexpectedly into class, we've been invited to see through Moko's eyes. And what she sees when she looks at her classmate Takahashi is either love at first sight, or maybe something more important: a first encounter with another queer person.

For my part, this is when I started to fully fall in love with Azuma's paneling, which I just think is great. Look at this sequence in the middle. Main character Moko, having encountered for the first time this mysterious classmate who can only come to school in a bunny suit, waits anxiously for a text back:

I love the strip of panels at the top of the first page here. It's this perfectly normal escalating sequence, panels getting tighter and the "camera" getting closer to Moko's face, more of the panel taken over by the faint shading... except for that second panel there which interrupts the pattern when she fumbles her phone and almost drops it. She fumbles both the phone and the sequence, in other words, which lines up with the recurring theme in the story of gaps between idealized teen romance and her actual alienated experience. It's really simple but endearing stuff, nothing that extraordinary in conceit but executed with care and flair.

And then that little narrow panel at the bottom of just her bangs and closed eyes, a panel that is hard to read on this page, but when you flip to the next becomes the windup to the great leap into midair, out of bed, out of the metaframe, and out of the real world of the story into expressive fantasy. The next pages are absolutely beautiful, as she soars first horizontally across, toward the next page spread where Takahashi, looking much smaller and more like a stuffed animal than a teenager in a suit, waits, and then in these beautiful vertical strips down to hug him. It's so sweet!

And then comes the next sequence:

Turning the page and hitting that reveal of Moko and Plush Fantasy Takahashi frolicking together on a tv screen, the "real" Takahashi watching it unreadably--oooo, I wanted to throw the comic across the room, scream, cheer, writhe like a flagellum, run a lap around my building in slow motion, smash every electronic device in my apartment with a guitar like Pink in The Wall, and write a Hey Look At This Comic about it (I've only done the last one) (and 2-4 also). What a fantastic visual metaphor for the disconnect between Moko's fantasy about this total stranger she's barely talked to, and how Takahashi, a kid who's been going to school in the nurse's office, makes of this message out of nowhere. Two whole pages of suspense, then, as Takahashi folds a paper airplane to fly back to her, and turning the page, the absolutely crushing reply: "WHY DID YOU MESSAGE ME? DID YOU THINK IT WOULD BE FUNNY?"

The next page is so stomach-turning for me. The buildup over the previous sequence has been so intense, and this is so restrained, so dominated by white space... it looks to me like how dissociation feels. And then the final page of the sequence, where Azuma brings back the motif of genre disjoint from earlier: "'Waiting to get a reply from my crush... I get so excited I feel like I could die.' In a story, it's an exciting time. In reality, it's a time when I want to die." I'm not sure how this reads in the original Japanese (and some of the translations overall in the Young Magazine sampler felt a bit off to me), but I like the subtlety of this, the contrast between "so excited you want to die" vs simply "wanting to die". The last shot of Moko being comforted by her bear toy hits so hard. I just think this whole sequence, this whole emotional rollercoaster, the way it's formalized across its 10 whole pages (out of 55, nearly 20% of the comic!), is so phenomenal.

If you want to see how this situation resolves (and I do think Azuma smartly tries to bring this "first chapter" to a satisfying conclusion on its own), you should check out the comic yourself... while you can. Voting ends sometime soon, as I type this--sorry I couldn't get my shit together earlier, but trust me, I'm sure it wouldn't have made a difference--and I don't really know what the fate of these one shots will be after the end of the voting period. Certainly their fate won't be archival in any long term sense. The official website is built as a single page running on React, a javascript library that by design basically kicks services like the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine in the teeth. What could have, bluntly, been a series of conventional html elements containing image files is instead a nightmare of data blobs being cast to canvas elements dynamically, every single action by the user pinging YM's servers. Publisher Kodansha mirrored the issue on their main site, which may last slightly longer than the almost certainly not long for this world Young Magazine US home page... but this is also unarchivable. I don't recommend checking for yourself: the page enters an age verification/reload loop that causes the archived version to strobe wildly.

If I seem a bit acidic about all this, it's because I just can't know the longevity of this comic I really liked, after I make this post. This is, bluntly, the best comic in the magazine, but it was always coming from behind. Even if people wanted queer storytelling, well, there's another Boys Love comic in the collection (one which read more like a webtoon or tapas than an actual print comic, and which didn't impress me at all I'm sorry to say), and for gender feels they offer Boys Run The Riot, also a really excellent comic, don't get me wrong, but one that is about a pretty normal trans experience, seemingly aimed at a market eager to get basic primers on the Issues and Struggles. Is My Love Strange? was written for the people who can't just integrate their desires and identities into a normative framework with a few asterisks. Complicated people. I don't think you personally need to have a plush kink or feel alienated from being human in the precise way these comic characters do to connect with this. Narratives about being "born this way" can be comforting, but god, the feeling in my heart when I read Takahashi's writing on the chalk board: "I don't like being a human boy. I'm not sure yet whether I dislike being human or being a boy." I don't need to wear a rabbit suit specifically to feel this captures my own experience with teenage gender dysphoria, an experience I didn't even have the social context to explain.

So, this comic means something to me, and it means something to me that others should read it. This morning I went to Sarah and asked her whether I should just scrap my plans to write all this, to write about Young Magazine at all. I couldn't be sure, after all, that once the deadline hit anyone would even be able to read this comic I liked so much. I couldn't be sure it would ever be preserved. And she said to me that this is the whole reason to write something like this: because it might be preserved as a record, in my review. I can at least say hey, this was here, it existed, and it meant something to me.

Hey!

Look at this comic!

shangri-la 1