Genre: BL/Yaoi
Price: $12.95
Age Rating: M/Mature/18+
Without thinking... in our own little world... just like two kids playing doctor. I never noticed there was also pain.
Sugar Milk is utterly delicious: a debut collection of shorts from an artist with a fresh and original approach and a visual style that grabs the eye.
I don't read BL for the gritty realism, because if I did, I would be constantly disappointed. My standards of realism in BL mostly relate to the absence of certain clichés that signal an artist who's spent more time reading BL manga than paying attention to the way actual human beings interact with each other. So the un-gritty but still very real dialogue and characterisation in Sugar Milk is a delightful surprise. The very first story, "What's Your Name?" concerns love at first sight -- usually the stuff of swooning romance, but here it's all tied up with nerves and social awkwardness and slobbery dogs.
"Fifteen" is a high school story. I often complain about high school stories in BL, but in fact some of my favourite BL manga are high school stories; I only complain because they're so ubiquitous and usually so blandly executed. "Fifteen" is a bit slight, but it works very well, mostly because it captures the awkwardness and immaturity of teenage boys, and the difficulty of communicating in a relationship when your own desires are unclear to you. "The Lingering Scent of a Rainbow" is a teacher/student story that acknowledges the potential ickyness of that kind of pairing while neatly sidestepping the issues, so as to produce a tender romance with a truly original treatment.
"Milk" and "Sugar" are the stories that give the collection its title; two stories in sequence about the childhood friends Taichi and Sho, who have had long gaps in their friendship when Sho disappeared. The way the two fumble and stumble their way into something more than friendship, with neither of them entirely willing at first to be honest about what they want, is convincing and also rather funny.
The final story, "Waiting for Winter", is oddly reminiscent of some stories by Est Em; a widowed photographer in his 40s begins to focus on one model, the beautiful long-haired young man Yoichi. There's a point in here about art capturing a moment in time and life being in motion, but it doesn't quite come off; still, I have to give Jaryu points for even trying to allude to a deeper theme, something very few BL mangaka bother with.
The visual style of Sugar Milk is a lot more individual and fresh than most debut collections; on the whole, despite some false notes, the volume is a joy to read. I look forward to seeing more from Dokoro Jaryu in future.
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