I Thot You Was a Toad's manga / #treachery(78)

Katsura Komachi's amazing story of the romance between Nagato, a tough transfer student who ends up leading a gang of delinquents at the rough-and-ready high school he now attends, and Kaga Ai, a yakuza henchman whose loyalty to the waka, Yamato, is unshakeable after Yamato saved him from white slavery. The story is slow-paced and surprisingly authentic given the volatile subject matter and how gangsters tend to be tarted up into Cupcake Yakuza Brigades when yaoi gets through with them. It also treats sexual assault and exploitation fairly realistically (not the slightest subliminal codification for the purpose of fetish gratification at all.) In all, it's a sweet, incredibly fluffy tale of first love. One of my favourites.

Youka Nitta's sweeping soap opera about Katou Youji and Iwake Kyousuke, two AV actors who risk everything to be true to themselves and each other. This story starts at the beginning of their relationship while they still work as porn actors, through negotiating their places and integrity in Japan's Byzantine entertainment industry, until they emerge with the approval of families, friends and colleagues; live together in their own home; make the movies they want, and eventually take responsibility for a production company, enduring treachery, censure, humiliation, attempted murder and even a huge earthquake in the process. The boys get a little overwrought at times, and ending feels a little truncated, no doubt in part to Youko Nitta's scandal, but the sex is hot and the overall arch is absorbing. A yaoi classic.

Hot shot cupcake yakuza waka #4, Tatsuyuki, is unwillingly sent to Fukouko to assume his duties, gets dead drunk in the midst of a set-up by subversive henchman, Rogi, is rescued by a playschool teacher, Minori, with whom he unknowingly shares a secret from the past. Eventually all these chaotic and seemingly random incidents join together in a surprisingly suspenseful and interesting plot. The villain is definitely a Boo!Hiss!Bad guy, but he has his own treacherous secrets and nothing in this strange little tale is what it seems at first glance. I certainly misread it. Now, I'm all "Read it! Read it! Read it!"

Ryouichi, abandoned by his male lover, runs from debt collectors to a tea shop where he is permitted to sit and rest. Unbeknownst to him, he has wandered right into the spider's web.

Alternate reality where shapeshifting animals live alongside human beings, only animals belong to yakuza gangs. A human vigilante tries to bring down these gangs with his secret ally. BUT mostly it's just a reason to have rough sex.

Kirirara is all-boy, but his mother entered him into a beauty contest as a youngster, which he won, so he has something to prove about being all-boy. It's just that when he's next to his neighbours, the cool brothers, especially Ken, he feels other things.

Sumikaya Kei is a former AV actor and crew member who has cut all ties to the past and works the box office at the local cinema theatre complex. This is where he attracts the attention of Okazaki, a young man of apparently good standing, who thinks he's beautiful. Sumikaya agrees to be sex friends, but Okazaki wants more. This comes to a head when Sumikaya's ex-boyfriend, the treacherous AV Director who used to secretly film their lovemaking and sell the tapes, reappears, followed by an even more sinister figure who requires inordinate courage to confront, setting up the story for an interesting suspense thriller.

Alternate reality in which dragons were used in a battle which seems to be styled on the Siege of Leningrad circa 1944. Like most of Inariya's work, this story is geared to meet the fetish for smartly tailored military uniforms on a burly, blond, wild-dog giant paired with a cold, cruel and dainty smaller man, along with BDSM in which the uke is Dominant. Like most of her stories, even when the relationship heats up with sex, there is always a violent and hostile undercurrent to the relationship. It's interesting, but cold.

Connor and Matthew were inseparable throughout a childhood which was horrifying for Matthew, until one day he discovered sex and Connor discovered he was gay, for Matthew. This resulted in a hellish school life for the boy, after which he picked himself up, reinvented himself as a supermodel, and wound up at the university of his dreams where, by chance, he reunited with Matthew, a changed young man who has no recollection of Connor or what he put him through. The art is a mix. There are beautiful moments; wild colours; strange, almost Byzantine, stylizations and stiffness; and an avoidance of scenery, buildings and fill for negative space; and a lack of facial micro-expressions. But it's getting better. Wait and see ...

Grumpy Mikado is Anezaki's office slave until the upstart underling films something that probably doesn't have as much traction nowadays since regular porn can be found everywhere and anywhere, but Anezaki gets some fine shots of Mikado's double life as a nerdy otaku, so tit-for-tat, and there was that one drunken incident together ... This leads to doing regular guy fun stuff together and—gasp!—actual friendship until an asshole comes sniffing around and interrupts a horrific scene which seems to belong to a whole other manga. Umm, yeah. Except this is quite a good little story and the characters are realistic, so read it anyway. It won't disappoint you.