Aoi House in Love, Vol.1

Story by Adam Arnold with Art by Shiei
Released by Seven Seas


Slugline: The showdown between yaoi and yuri should be more exciting than this.

Aoi House in Love continues the story of Aoi House, and should be considered as part of that larger story than a new series. Basically the folks from Aoi House go to a con, has a friendly competition of Uri House (a house of yuri fans, rather than fans of Uri Geller) and goes into a cosplay challenge with some The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya fans. I really wanted to give this volume a gentleman's 3 stars, but after going back and forth on it, I just couldn't. A harder decision than you think because I know that people from Seven Seas read this blog, but too many things come up and drop out of the story with minimal explanations, the weird relationship between Alex, Elle and Morgan just doesn't feel real, and the reality TV angle that keeps on being tossed into the mix relies on the boy's cluelessness rather than the reader's cleverness to remain hidden. It also suffers in comparison to Dramacon, another manga set at a convention, whose less complicated and even sparse style makes Aoi House in Love seem messy and uncontrolled, an unfair but inevitable comparision. Many of the same concerns I had with Aoi House vol. 2 still hold true here also so that this is now more a title for people who just love harem comedies or need to see what happens . I believe the next volume is the final one, so here's hoping that they can wrap it up as well as they began it.

Oh, just to make a me a total meanie, the color 4-panel comics in the back just didn't seem that funny.



Aoi House in Love, vol. 1 is also available from Right Stuf, Intl., an online retailer specializing in anime and manga.

-Ferdinand

Aoi House, v. 1

Written by Adam Arnold with art by Shiei
Published by Seven Seas



Harem titles. Some people like them, sane people don't. Urgh, sorry, my prejudices are showing, but I just find them, well, maybe on occasion amusing, but it just strains credulity to that so many women would find one guy, especially the dopey guys that they seem to find to be the male leads of harem comedies, so irresistible. I wish that being shy and studious was all that was necessary to draw to women to me. Then again, despite being surrounded by beautiful women, the insurance premiums must be murderously high due to the constant beatings they endure.

Thanks to Seven Seas we have the logical response to harem comedies, with two college guys surrounded by yaoi-obsessed fangirls. Ah, sweet justice. Thanks to a minor sign failure that turned Yaoi House into the more innocent sounding Aoi House, these two anime fans, Alex and Sandy, and their perverted hamster find themselves in Aoi House, filled with scantily clad women whose only interest is seeing how long the guys can keep their hands off each other.

Aoi House is a fast-paced fun little story that knows better than to take itself too seriously. And knows it should make the jokes that never seem to be made in the more traditional harem comedies. Strong recommendation and a reminder that Aoi House is the Seven Seas webmanga, so you can preview it at their website, www.gomanga.com.



- Ferdinand.

Ai Yori Aoshi, vols. 1-3 collected

By Kou Fumizuki
Published in the US by TokyoPop


Slugline: True Blue Boredom

Kaoru has left his abusive family behind to go to college, but a childhood friend appears one day. Aoi remembers when they were betrothed to each other, and has spent her life getting ready for that, and just because Kaoru is no longer the heir to his family fortune is no reason to change plans now. Kaoru does like Aoi, and they manage to come to arrangement that allows them to get to know each other better at the cost of keeping their relationship a secret. Of course, that means that Kaoru's friends at the college have to get involved and complicate things.

Thank goodness this was a collected edition, because the first volume went by in a blink. I have learned to appreciate, even sometimes treasure the fact that a manga story can take its time to unfold, but in this case it means that in the 2nd and 3rd volumes that are still hitting all of the shojo cliche story/settings, such as the amusement park, hot springs and school festival chapters. The characters are really earnest and all, but all I could think while reading it was boring, boring, boring. Seen it all before, over and over. There is all of this storytelling potential about Kaoru and Aoi's families, and it is not even touched upon in the first three volumes of the series. Maybe creators need to fill the first few volumes of series with these cliche scenes in order to get in the time to explore the characters and get a handle on them before heading into more individualized stories, but that just means that we end up reviewing a lot of similar first volumes of shojo titles. Is there anything bad here? No, not really, but it is very run of the mill. If you have read more than a dozen shojo titles, you can skip this volume without missing much.



Ai Yori Aoshi, vols. 1-3 collected is also available from Right Stuf, Intl., an online retailer specializing in anime and manga

-Ferdinand

Aoi House, v. 2

Written by Adam Arnold with Art by Shiei
Published by Seven Seas



Slugline: Harem girls who know that they are in harem, and know enough to mock the whole situation.

The second volume of the OEL Aoi House, I feel, suffers from its legacy of being a webcomic and being printed by Newtype USA. Sure, everyone and their cousin has either been exposed to it (heh, sorry, feeling the sophomoric humor, exposed to it, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more) via the reprints or the webcomics, but the fact that it has to be continually up, always funny, always grabbing people's attention, means that it never has a lull in the action. When you read it as a graphic novel, you need those lulls for character bits, so that the characters hit more than one note. While a couple of the harem girls did so, I think the majority of characters were more obviously one-note than they were in the first volume. I am not sure whether that is just me, the side effect of writing for graphic novel or webcomic, but it was just not as surprising as the first one.

What did take me almost completely out of the story was the Final Fantasy riff in the middle of the volume. Apparently, I am the only anime/manga fan whose knowledge of Final Fantasy is gleaned solely from AMVs I have watched over the years. So I recognized a couple of the outfits, but the whole joke just went right over my head. Not necessarily its fault.

I still like the central conceit of a couple of hetero fanboys trapped in a harem of yaoi-crazed fangirls. There was some movement toward an overriding story arc, but this volume just didn't get to me the same way the first one did.



- Ferdinand