muse ✨'s manga / #mangaka(5)

Manga artist in love with his younger brother's friend gets the shock of his life when he shows up at his front door and asks to stay. Neighbors and childhood friends start dating.

An unsuccessful mangaka finds work for an ero publication and is pursued by his editor.

A series of oneshots from Scarlet Beriko. They all move pretty quickly but the art is pretty. The fourth chapter has two 37yo characters.

After he's transferred to the BL department, a hopeful editor scours doujinshi looking for the next rising star. He finds it in a guy who draws DJs for extra money and agrees to be his reference model. But the lines blur when they take pictures together, and then start sleeping together, and then start living together... Honestly, the main couple in this did nothing for me, even though this is the author behind my favorite confession scene. The side couple (the mangaka's otaku brother & his lover, from an older story by the same author) had a lot more emotional resonance. The manga suffers from the same plot issue as the manga-within-the-manga: the love story falls flat. The relationship was one-sided until the end, and while it does end with them together, I never felt they were in love.

Introverted adult mangaka Mutsu spots his former basketball club member Akiharu on his way to a job agency and offers him a job as a live-in assistant. Akiharu manages the household and takes care of Mutsu, who rarely goes outside, running manuscripts to his editor and even going so far as to help him masturbate to spare his wrists. Their relationship becomes intense and close, but when Akiharu talks about the possibility of a girlfriend in the future, Mutsu begins to pull away. BIG KUDOS to the author for sex gone wrong the first time. Everyone has great first-time sex in mangaland, and I liked that these two had a less-than-satisfying first go with penetration. And then they worked things out together! Yay. A happy story.