Blue Eyes, vol. 3

By Tohru Nishimaki
Published in the US by Icarus Publishing


Slugline: An actual boyfriend! Admittedly a cheating, manipulative one, but still!

Tatsuya has seduced both his girlfriend Maria and her best friend Lisa to be his lovers, but he does not want to sneak between them as he has to with his liaisons with Maria's mother. So her sets up Maria and Lisa to accept sharing him openly in a menage atrois. Tatsuya then discovers that there are other women in Maria's family he has yet to seduce when visiting England and begins taking steps to correct this terrible oversight.

Tatsuya comes close to being a paragon of virtue for porn manga, for he is merely manipulative and arrogant when the standard is cruel, distant and abusive. Sure, he has to seduce every large breasted woman that wanders by, especially if they are related to his girlfriend, but the ogling and horndog behaviors are almost typical for teen boys. The art is rigid and the dialogue is stilted, but few porn titles had any worthwhile dialogue to begin with and women who merely violate the laws of biology/physics in breast size seem refreshingly normal. If this review seems overly forgiving perhaps it is because the last few adult titles that were in the review queue for Prospero's Manga were not finished once started because they were creepy and/or disturbing. This is a tolerable porn manga in which the characters' kinks and fetishes are not the stuff of crime dramas.

Blue Eyes, vol. 1 has been previously reviewed on Prospero's Manga - Mature.



Blue Eyes, vol. 3 is also available from Right Stuf, Intl., an online retailer specializing in manga and anime.

-Ferdinand

Extract

Presented by Kazu Shimao
Published in the US by Icarus Publishiing


Slugline: Meh. Can porn be boring?

An anthology of unrelated stories that span the many genres of the manga pornography, with the only major exception being there is no hermaphrodites lurking about. None of the stories are too offensive but neither are they particularly memorable. I suspect that in this case the shortness of the stores worked against the creator, for in most stories the characters are fixed in the mind with very little space given to create them. If there had been more pages devoted to some of the stories the characters could have emerged as more than just placeholders. The art was okay, a little busy, but no one appeared to be triple-jointed or had geysers of gallons of bodily fluids. It is a very workmanlike volume, not so bad I got offended for the characters but neither anything to look for or forward to.



Extract is available from Right Stuf, Intl., an online retailer specializing in anime and manga.

-Ferdinand

Innocence, 2nd ed.

By Kamogawa Tanuki
Released in the US by Icarus Publishing


Slugline: The standard assortment of porn fetishes, only now with women drawn as prepubescent girls.

Porn has a different goal in mind that most manga, which is why I rated this as high as I did despite disliking most of the fetishes than are on display here. Humiliation, servitude, the diminution of the female self in the pursuit of sex, perceived infantilization of the characters, especially the women, all do very little for me.

Of course, for some readers, these are positives. Does Innocence execute these fetishes in an interesting way? Reasonably well, and the art is well done. For the 2nd edition, there is a new short bonus section with more detailed art. The only story that captured my attention was My Girlfriend's Feelings, My Sister's Feelings, because it actually tried to be funny, as the girlfriend has to listen her boyfriend's sister disparage him despite knowing (through flashbacks) that he is anything but how she describes. Not brilliant, but a welcome different kind of story.

Innocence, 2nd ed. is available from Right Stuf, Intl., an online retailer specializing in anime and manga.

-Ferdinand

Please Miss Yuri

By Syowmaru
Released in the US by Icarus Comics


Slugline: What is it about nurse's offices?

Once again the school nurse's office is a den of iniquity. What is it about them that invites depravity? Probably because there are the only places in a school that has a bed and privacy, but really, can't people meet at their homes? I mean, it seems that everyone's parents are working a continent away, I think it would be more convenient to take care of these urges at home.

It's porn. It's teacher-student porn, with the punishment kink (oh, I am such a bad teacher, punish me) sort of stuff, but at least everyone seems to know that people are faking it in order to feed their kinks. The art is relatively nice and straightforward, without triple joints or violations of the laws of fluid dynamics. There are a couple backup pieces that spin off it in the back, but honestly, I was sort of blah about the whole thing. It's porn, it's competent but there wasn't anything there that really grabbed my attention.

-Ferdinand

Midara, 2nd ed.

By Yumisuke Kotoyoshi
Released in the US by Icarus Publishing


Slugline: All of these poor women are going to have back problems, or will need industrial bras once the sagging starts...

First off, this is PORN. For the people who got to this review via keyword search, there is no actual porn in this review, so you may leave. There are links below to buy the title, but please respect the 18+ barriers. This also means I am reviewing it as porn title which has different standards.

There are two multi-part stories in this volume whose protagonists are featured on the cover. Megumi is a Lara Croft wannabe who travels the world exploring ruins. However, the creatures and the other nasties in said ruins just can't leave her alone. In the other, Saeko is a cop who often ends up the prisoner of the exploitative criminals that she is trying to capture and has to be rescued by her partner, the smart yet cute one of their two women team. The rest of the volume is filled up with one-off stories.

The women here are not completely helpless, which is a step up from most hentai. The women manage to be exploited and the exploiter at the same time for the two main story arcs, which I am sure says something very ironic in feminist theory. The story that I enjoyed the most was one of the one shots that finished out the volume, Sleep Talking, in which two old friends end up being a couple, or do they? The women here are used for their bodies but they ultimately turn the tables on the men by use of their brains, and the women substitutes who literally lack their own mind (such as robots) are unable to turn the tables. So I guess that is an interesting subtext, so on its own terms it mostly succeeds. But I still had to deduct points for the tentacle scene...



Midara, 2nd ed. is also available from Right Stuf, Intl., an online retailer specializing in anime and manga.

-Ferdinand

Swing Out Sisters

Presented by Taro Shinonome
Published in the US by Icarus Publishing


Slugline: I have never been so happy to have been an only child.

This, like all of Icarus’s other works, is PORN. I will not be giving details here, but the links below to buy said work have 18+ blockers on them, so respect that. Click here for a list of our other Icarus reviews.

Yuuta has a problem. He lives with his sisters, Chiyoko the oldest sister takes care of him and his other sister, Chinatsu. Chiyoko is older and is more, umm mature, whereas Chinatsu is younger and more bossy. Yuuta, on the other hand, is a complete mush, and falls into a sexual relationship. Chinatsu upon learning this demands her own relationship with Yuuta, and when Chiyoko find out, well, this is a porn book, what do you think happens? There is also a backup story of a pirate brother and sister who are brought together by a water spirit through an interesting use of futanari (if you don't know what that is, and want to know, well, click here, but don't say we didn't warn you.)

Oh, incest. What would hentai be without it? I am lucky that I am only child, because this immediately pushes this out to fantasy land for me without any effort. My major thing with porn is that there at least be an illusion of consent, and it is here. My problem was that it took me a while to tell the sisters apart (the difference between them being brown and black hair? Not very helpful in a black and white book.) in the scenes where one sister’s, umm, superior assets where not visible. The first story seems out of sequence from the others, so it was more difficult to piece together the plotline, what little there was, than it had to be. The pages seemed a little bit too busy with sound FX, but other than that, this was a fairly good read for a porn manga.

Swing Out Sisters is available from Right Stuf, Intl., an online retailer specializing in anime and manga.

-Ferdinand

Flashbang!

By Yoshitatsu Kiichigono
Released in the U.S. by Icarus Publishing



Slugline: Remember that dream you had about going to school naked? It just got worse!

Like all Icarus titles, this is PORN.

PORN!

So for the remainder of the people who are still reading this, or who haven't figured out how to set up the parental controls, I try to review porn books on their own merits. That is: how well they deliver the porn, not in how well the story flows, or the art, or, well, the usual criteria (though if it does manage it, I am more likely to give it a better rating). I do have a problem with non-consensual stories, and I realize that yes, it is fiction, but I am just not wired to find that sort of stuff appealing.

This came close, because this entire volume was about humiliation and exhibitionism, with many of the forms of humiliation being because of exhibitionism. Fortunately, force wasn't really used here (other than one or two stories) so I wasn't working against an ick factor here. There isn't a central story either, just vignettes where people are forced to publicly strip, have sex, and the other aspects of humiliation/exhibitionism sex. Most of the other usual tropes of hentai are there, but muted to focus on the exhibitionist fetish which seems to the point of this volume (for instance, there is just ONE cross dressing guy.)

The art sometimes verges on the cute side, so sometimes it is hard to take the stuff going on very seriously. Since the characters don't seem to be taking themselves all that seriously, it gives you the emotional distance necessary for these characters to remain just pictures on a page, so that even the humiliation has a distance to it. But the volume is all about the exhibitionism fetish, so if that is not your cup of tea -- since quite frankly I can't think of anything that couldn't be interpreted as a clever double entendre -- your appreciation of the volume will be probably be directly proportional to your appreciation of exhibitionism.

Flash Bang! is available from Right Stuf, Intl., an online retailer specializing in anime and manga.

- Ferdinand