live! nude! jewel thieves!

If you're anything like me, it's important to remember not to read things like Sensual Phrase and Gorgeous Carat in public, unless you don't mind disturbing the people around you with incessant giggling and constant mutters of "oh my, god, she WENT THERE" and "'your amethyst eyes are more precious to me than jewels,' so I'm going to PICKLE THEM"

The beginning of Sensual Phrase is bizarre and ridiculous in that way I've come to expect from shoujo manga (if indeed it's shoujo; the sexual content is considerably farther beyond what I'd want to give to a young teen girl, but it doesn't strike me as being particularly emotionally mature in its approach to said sexual content): a male idol hires a teenage virgin girl to write him erotic lyrics; his chosen method for inspiring her is to sexually tease her. I went out and bought the second volume the day after finally reading the first not because I thought it was terribly good, but because it made me laugh harder than anything I'd read in weeks. I'm not positive I was supposed to be laughing at the things I was laughing at, though...


Gorgeous Carat is another matter. It's candy, I admit; eye-candy and brain-candy both. I have a sneaking feeling that it's made with the kind of unabashed, "let me tell you a story with everything I love best," sincerity that rachelmanija describes in the author's notes in Project Blue Rose. The first volume alone features bondage and whipping; volume two introduces gunfire, needles under the nails, forced administration of opium...and then it gets REALLY sketchy. Sketchy is, in fact, the only way I feel I can adequately sum up Gorgeous Carat. It's one giant fetish manga, with no apparent pretensions of being anything but really pretty and really fun. And making me giggle and mutter and hold my breath and gasp in surprise.

That was praise, by the way.

Gorgeous Carat features some of the most skillful, beautiful, and erotically charged art I've seen outside of Saiyuki. You Higuri art at its best is fantastically beautiful, especially the male characters, and appealing to me in the way that, oh, Milo Manara has always failed to be.

(It's also aimed solidly at...whatever exact fannish contingent out there likes to see extraordinarily beautiful men be really into each other while the pretty, but not nearly so sexualized female characters around them cheer them on, and have a hot, sparky, suggestive relationship with lots of hints but that doesn't quite go there as of volume two, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it did eventually, because Higuri breaks the fourth wall with jokes about whether or not Noir's an uke, and hasn't shown any hesitation about indulging the other fetish aspects of the story, so I think she's only holding off so far because she's got excellent pacing. And did I mention that the American translation of this is being published by Blu?

La.)


Speaking of Higuri and torture fetishes, Cantarella volume 3 features a major character getting hung by his thumbs. Literally. Isn't pseudo-historical fiction awesome?



Next up: I run around like a headless chicken and spaz some more about how Please Save My Earth is so amazingly good in a non-fetishistic way.