This Week in Anime

Manga to Show Your Pride

Steve
Of course! We're about halfway through June now, and while the political landscape is rough out there, I think that's all the more reason to seize the moment and double down on the breadth and beauty of the human experience. And speaking of breadth, one thing our Lezhin feature last week impressed on me was the sheer volume of queer reading material published daily. I tried counting the number of BL webtoons on that site and gave up. Manga is a different story, obviously, but I came to a similar conclusion while preparing for this column. There is so much out there. More queer manga of more genres and for more demographics than we'll ever be able to adequately cover in a single feature. More than I'll ever know in my lifetime. Even listing my favorites was a daunting task, but a reassuring one as well. These stories aren't going anywhere.

It's not just us losers writing for an anime website, either! Legitimate institutions are recognizing the artistic merits of queer manga. Look no further than My Journey to Her, an autobiographical manga from Yūna Hirasawa currently nominated for an Eisner.

Deservedly so, too! It's an uncommonly frank and graphically detailed account of her gender-affirming surgery in Thailand back in 2015. It's as affecting as it is educational. She uses this food-based model to skirt censorship and explain how vaginoplasty works, and it's the most informative breakdown of the procedure I've ever seen.

I want to commend the localization too, which was published last year and acknowledges a lot of the still-in-progress legislative developments affecting trans people in Japan. As Hirasawa frequently communicates, there are a lot of societal and bureaucratic barriers to being trans in Japan, but things are slowly but surely getting better. It's also a good companion piece to The Bride Was a Boy, another autobio from a trans woman written around the same time. My Journey to Her focuses more on the specifics of the surgery, while Chii's book has a broader scope.

It's adorable! The art style gives the vibe away, and Chii herself is chipper as she narrates her life, even the frustrating parts. There's a lot of overlap with Hirasawa's account, but a second perspective will always give you a more three-dimensional picture. I also own a physical copy of it because this was before my shelves started running out of space and after Seven Seas started to publish a lot of LGBTQIA+-oriented manga, which was a big deal at the time!

I mean, I think that also highlights one of the many nuances that arise when we talk about "queer manga" in that kind of monolithic sense. Something written by a queer person about their own experiences is going to read much differently than, say, a fantasy series with a gay romance at the core of it. That diversity is an unavoidable and good thing, if you ask me, but it complicates questions about what queer manga is and, more controversially, what queer manga is supposed to be.

For example, Nagata Kabi's oeuvre has drawn its fair share of criticism for her raw and confessional style, but My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness also did well enough commercially and critically to warrant a "special edition" printing. That's quite the journey for something originally published on pixiv, and it spoke to a lot of people, yours truly included.

I'm still shocked we're getting it published in English later this year. I only know Hibari-kun by reputation, and I'm sure it ain't perfect, but it's a seminal work I'm eager to read for myself. It's certainly not the "first" queer manga. I don't know if there's a definitive answer for what it is, but shojo mangaka, in particular, were no strangers to playing with gender and sexuality in the '70s. Moto Hagio herself wrote works like The Heart of Thomas, a BL progenitor, and They Were 11!, a sci-fi thriller with some gender weirdness in it. By the way, I just got a physical copy of Denpa's release of They Were 11!, and that is a chonky boy stuffed full of Hagio's gorgeous art.

I mustn't forget Riyoko Ikeda, either. The Rose of Versailles and Dear, Brother may not be predominantly queer narratives, but they're built with queer components. Oscar's gender presentation. Nanako's infatuation with Saint-Juste. These paved the way for, among other things, works like Revolutionary Girl Utena that played with and commented on these tropes in both manga and anime form. Ikeda also authored Claudine, one of the earliest examples of an explicitly transgender manga protagonist.

Claudine isn't perfect—it should be named Claude instead—but like Hibari-kun, it's an important part of the grander narrative.

Like any artistic work, a manga is a living, breathing thing. As personal and cultural attitudes adjust, things are re-read, reevaluated, and reinterpreted constantly. I think it's fair to call the Devilman manga ahead of its time, and Crybaby realizes that. Similarly, I'd love someone to license or adapt F. COMPO. I haven't read it myself, but why wouldn't I want to see what the City Hunter man does with this premise: a guy gets adopted by his aunt and uncle, who are both trans, and does comedy shenanigans with his genderfluid cousin.

Like, I'm not expecting much from something made in the '90s with this premise, but I think it's valuable nonetheless to see that mangaka have always been exploring queer themes and characters.

There will always be salient arguments about what constitutes "good" representation, but I like messy stuff. After loving the anime adaptation, I just caught up with the Onimai manga. While I agree the anime makes a lot of smart changes, I also don't think you can get away from the fact that Onimai is, in its own gently perverse way, a fundamentally compassionate examination of the benefits of socially transitioning.

I have seen people online get really upset at the implication that JoJo's is anything but the straightest of straight manga, and that is the funniest hill to die on.

One of my all-time favorite mangaka is Shūzō Oshimi, both because he is a master of his craft and because his works often dive into uncomfortably confessional and muddled depths regarding gender and identity. Ironically, I think that makes him refreshingly frank about his anxieties. Welcome Back, Alice in particular feels like sticking your eyeball into someone's open wound—nothing else like it.

Inside Mari is an older work of his, dealing with similar gender questioning, and I can also recommend that. While The Flowers of Evil isn't explicitly queer, in the context of Oshimi's later manga, you can extract some potent readings from it.

Q Hayashida is so cool. There's a trans woman in Dorohedoro, too; this is how she's introduced: with a turkey on her head. And her name is Turkey. I love Dorohedoro.

Horror is just perfect for probing at society's rough edges and hypocrisies. But you can also do a lot with more down-to-earth narratives. One of the best queer manga of the past decade has to be Our Dreams At Dusk, which at times feels excruciatingly tethered to reality in between its brief flights of fancy and stunningly composed symbolism.

It also stands out from its peers for its focus on an intersectional and multi-generational queer support group, as well as the different tiers of discrimination they face. It covers a tremendous amount of territory in four volumes and never seems to shortchange any of its characters.

It's so good. The mangaka Yuhki Kamatani has come out as asexual and X-Gender, too, so their experiences authenticate the drama and character development. Just lots of thoughtful and nuanced observations about how we hurt and help each other.

It's a great pick! On the other side of the trans spectrum, next month, we're getting an official localization of I Wanna Be Your Girl about a trans girl entering high school with her best friend, who navigates her crush on her.

It's very fluffy, and I like that it's being published by Penguin Random House specifically for young readers. I hope that's a sign of things to come. Now, on a completely different note, queer manga doesn't have to be all-ages to be queer. There's a whole world of porn catering to all types and identities, and I think that deserves mention as well. I remember being stoked, for instance, when Fakku started their LGBTQIA+ imprint, Kuma. I picked up one of their first titles, Can an Otaku Like Me Really Be an Idol?, and it's a lot of fun! Gay crossdressing shenanigans where the crossdresser tops!

As with most things, I think you want a balanced diet—you probably shouldn't get your exposure to queer themes and characters solely through porn. However, that doesn't diminish the power or importance of porn! I also want to shout out Chris Farris for pointing me toward some smaller and spicier titles that were part of the recent manga guide. Out of Control, for example, is a combo omegaverse + futanari doujinshi drawn by gram, an artist I immediately recognized as a Steven Universe fan artist I used to follow.

Can you tell they liked Jasper a lot?

And here's my obligatory Gushing Over Magical Girls plug, which we're getting in physical form next month. Because, in all seriousness, the intersection of queerness and kink is an intersection worth exploring.

It makes sense! I'm looking at how much we've written so far and how many titles I still haven't mentioned. Do you want to do some lightning-round recommendations before we wrap up?

Yuri Is My Job! is genius deconstruction of its genre. Bloom Into You is just plain genius. How Do We Relationship? and Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon are both good adult yuri titles. Citrus is trash, but it's my trash. The Kase-san series is too cute. On the BL side of things, Given is a great accompaniment to the recent string of yuri band dramas. Monster And The Beast has a really fun main pair. I Hear the Sunspot is fantastic. My Brother’s Husband is expertly constructed by a master mangaka. And I'm looking forward to Smell, a furry BL work from Nagabe of The Girl from the Other Side fame.

Good choices! Finally, I promised myself I wouldn't end this column without extolling the vicious virtues of Fumiko Fumi. Because no matter how much queer manga gets localized nowadays—and it truly is amazing how much that has progressed in the past decade—there are volumes upon volumes more that don't get translated. Fumi's Bokura no Hentai is one of the most gripping and devastating queer narratives I've ever read. Every chapter makes you want to gawk at the art and/or scream into a pillow. One of the main characters is trans, one dresses up as a girl to woo his crush, and the other crossdresses as his dead sister to ease his mom's suffering. It's rough, nasty, and difficult to recommend, but ultimately sympathetic to its main trio. I hope some publisher gives me the chance to talk about it properly here one day.

As a wise man in an anime based on a Riyoko Ikeda manga once said,