rec

[buggery]

So, if you've been involved in slash fandom any length of time at all, you've probably heard of From Eroica With Love. I certainly heard OF it long before I had any real idea what it was (beyond a series of some sort that a number of my fellow slashers followed) -- which is, a Japanese "boys love" comic originally published starting in the mid-1970s.

Boys love manga, also known as yaoi ("yow-ee"), have traditionally been aimed at an audience of adolescent girls, and features romantic and/or sexual relationships between male characters. (Yes, there's a good deal of crossover between yaoi and slash; I'm often tempted to say the main difference lies in the mainstream awareness of yaoi in Japan vs. the near-invisibility of slash in the West, but it's not quite as simple as that.)

Eroica isn't explicit, or rather it's not as graphic as some manga get; the dialogue makes the characters' desire for one another quite clear. Or at least, the first three "chapters," stories approximately seventy-five pulp-comic pages in length each, which comprise the first volume of the From Eroica With Love collection, isn't explicit. I'm not entirely sure what later volumes may bring.

There have been fan translations of Eroica, as well as other manga, available for years. The internet and affordable scanners have made it possible for fans to "scanslate" many Japanese comics -- scan in the pages, edit out the japanese characters, and replace them with English (or other language) translations using a program like Photoshop, then compile all the scans into .zip or torrent format for other fans to download from sites like Hochuuami or Nakama.

Now, at long last, there is an official translation of this classic of yaoi manga... and it's available in a comics shop near you, because DC comics is distributing it.

To be precise, it's been released under the "CMX" imprint, a subdivision of Wildstorm, itself the "mature readers" division of DC Comics. (Rather than an adult content warning, the cover is marked "T for teen; sexual themes" like the video-game ratings system.)

Still. I LOVE MY FANDOM. And I love DC.


More on Eroica, for those who need convincing (mild spoilers follow):

"Eroica" is the name of an international art theft ring. At the center of this ring is Earl Dorian Red Gloria, an indolent, effete aristocrat whose wardrobe rivals that of David Bowie's (70s incarnation) for flamboyance and androgyny. He loves beautiful things, and pursues anything he wants single-mindedly until it is his -- artworks and men alike. Some of the plot elements veer far over the silliness threshhold (TM lcsbanana): a trio of friends gifted with superpowers and linked telepathically after meeting a strange old man in the Andes mountains, an eighteen-year-old university professor, an amphibious zeppelin,, a male German military officer with shoulder-length hair. If you can get past, or enjoy, the farcical and absurd aspects of the story, there's plenty of entertainment value. Dorian pursues his quarry, and everyone, it seems, eventually falls under the sway of his charisma. There are moments of pure inspired hilarity, such as when a lovely young man whom Dorian has taken a fancy to is shown holed up in his room, a book titled 'How to Handle an Unwanted Gay Love Interest' on his bed. The art is manga style (big shiny anime eyes, tiny noses, characters periodically turning chibi with strong emotion) but good-quality, as is the printing (the ink is reasonably colourfast, but the paper is closer to newsprint grade than fans of American comics tend to expect nowadays).

All in all, I found volume 1 of From Eroica With Love well worth the $9.95 cover price, and I'm looking forward to volume 2.


If the maintainer of dc_clocktower, or anyone else who thinks they know the answer -- the community info specifies Vertigo titles as welcome, but doesn't mention Wildstorm, much less CMX -- would let me know whether I ought to link to this rec there, I'd appreciate it.

Comments

I love this series so much.

[jamjar.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, I wouldn't classify Eroica as shounen ai or yaoi. I don't know what I'd classify it as exactly, but... It's an old series. It's what, 20-30 years old? teh art style is old as well.

There's been a persistant feeling in the community that Eroica comes as slash. To me, it feels like slash, like a slash fandom, much more so than yaoi or shounen ai. I don't know what it is-- perhaps that the m/m is a part of, but not the whole, or even necessarily the focus of the series. It's mostly adventrue/comedy. I can't believ I'm saying this, but in some ways the canon fits more into my definition of *Gen*. To me, Gen means that while m/m, m/f and f/f may exist and be an important part of the story, they are not the *reason* for it, not the focus of it.


The art for a lot of it is straighter than most-- relatively little chibi, no SD. Sweatdrops and so on of course, because those are cultural elemants, ratehr than art-style things. It's very old school, even in the most recent publications. I have

The fan translations pre-date the internet. This is old school, 'zine style translations, baby.

Re: I love this series so much.

[codyne]

In Japan, Eroica is classified as shoujo (girls' comics), but I don't know if that's a very useful term for Western readers.

I haven't read my old fan translations of Eroica in years, but I'm definitely going to have to catch up with it again in the new releases.

[minim_calibre]

Huh. Guess I should add Wildstorm, eh?

Re: I love this series so much.

[jamjar.livejournal.com]

And it's still being published in Margereat.

It is shoujo by those standards, but I'm guessing the average reader age is lot older-- josei, you know? And it's certainly not standard girl-orientated fare. Not with the spy-plots and so on.

Do you know where Z was published?

Re: I love this series so much.

[buggery.livejournal.com]

It's my understanding that Eroica pre-dates the emergence of yaoi as a category separate from (but often bridging) girls' and boys' comics. Still, thematically, I think yaoi is the closest-to-accurate term.

My personal definition of slash includes a sense that while the m/m (or f/f) element may be strongly hinted at, its existence is inferred, built upon, and made a story element by fans, rather than the medium's creator. Thus, pairings like Talia Winters/Susan Ivanova from Babylon 5, pretty much anybody in Queer as Folk, or Apollo and the Midnighter of The Authority, aren't actually slash pairings, because they're acknowledged as canon pairings.

You've shown me some manga that, similar to Eroica, have a plot focus other than the love relationship -- I'm thinking of Sakende Yaruze and Otona no Mondai, in particular.

I guess what I'm getting at is that while From Eroica With Love has elements in common with both slash and yaoi,

Re: I love this series so much.

[buggery.livejournal.com]

::hugs on Cody::

That's sort of what I was getting at -- officially, it's a shoujo manga, but in practice it's as close to being shounen or yaoi as shoujo (or even josei) for a variety of reasons. At least, as I understand all those terms.

Like I said... oh. Hm. The end of my comment got cut off!

Eroica stands alone. It is Something Else.

[buggery.livejournal.com]

Um... maybe?

Not up to me to decide, really. Possibly there should be a Poll, so people can vote for whether they want to see stuff about The Authority, Sleeper etc. and/or CMX manga releases on dc_clocktower.

[grey-bard.livejournal.com]

Ah, Eroica. How I love thee. Having a friend who has read scanslations for the entire series to date, I can tell you right now that there Is No Sex on the page. So, not quite yaoi, as I've seen it defined.

As for the slash levels, on one side the relationship is canonically gay and on the other it is more traditionally slashy. Well, you'll see.

If anyone is looking for more info on the comic or the fandom, there was a nice write up on it on "The Crack Van".
http://www.livejournal.com/community/crack_van/11157.html

Re: I love this series so much.

[jamjar.livejournal.com]

But there is no *resolved* relationship in Eroica. Klaus, poor deluded man, is still maintaining his straightness. Dorian has not yet canonically succeeded. It's one way, or unrequited or *unresolved*, but it's not about the romance. Dorian is gay, but Klaus is-- well, canonically asexual, I suppose, given that he doesn't have any acknowledged sexual relationships and admits to disliking women and gay men.

Otona-- I wouldn't call yaoi. There are canon gay characters in the story, but the series isn't about romance or sex. Yaoi is about sex, always. That's the definition of it (yaoi the word is pretty much analagous to pwp, in both meaning and etymology). Otona is about a lot of relationships, most of them familial. To me, it's gen.

Sakende, on the other hand-- it stretches across the border, and some chapters focus more on one aspect than another, but what drives the plot now is m/m sexual relationships. The non-sexual relationships, the family ones, were pretty much resolved in the first volume. They're still part of it, and a good part, they still form the basis for the characters, but the plot is about their respective romantic/sexual relationships.

[buggery.livejournal.com]

Ah, nice! Thanks for the link and the info.

[maverynthia.livejournal.com]

>Boys love manga, also known as yaoi

Wrong!

Boys love manga is Shonen-Ai literally Boys-love, and Eroica is Shonen-ai.

Yaoi is manga and stories that involve sex and nothing but sex,"yama nasi, ochi nashi, imi nashi" or "no climax, no plot, no point." between males.

http://www.sugoiweb.com/faq.php##11