SEVERELY TWISTED TAILS

Despite the title, this is not about nekomimi, though it is about manga.
[Manga: Japanese graphic novels and comic-strips. Nekomimi: catgirls - usually impossibly vixenish damsels with cat ears and long furry tails that extend out from their short short skirts or tight tight shorts.]


There are three manga series which I am currently reading: Chibi Vampire, Pretty Face, and Ghost Talker's Daydream.


CHIBI VAMPIRE

The first is a charming tale about a defective teenage vampire, who is easily embarrassed. Unlike other members of her family, Karin doesn't hide during daytime, and doesn't drink blood - she expels it in huge gushing torrents from her nose once a month instead. Yes, nosebleeds are a Japanese illustrative convention indicating sexual excitement. No, here it simply means that she is chock-full of blood. And let us not talk about what 'normal' girls do once a month with blood.

Volume ten hit the bookstore recently, and I have already devoured it (tongue delicately rimming the lips of my slightly open mouth). I have been avidly following the story since I first discovered it several months ago, and I delight in every new twist to Karin and her shy classmate Kenta Usui's budding relationship. There is nothing sexual here (unless you have a filthy mind, which I do), and the interplay of the various characters has a distinct dysfunctional charm.

There are some memorable bits - "Mommy, why are you dragging daddy across the floor?" "'Cause he's an idiot, that's why!". But mostly it is just a charming romance between two young people who are social klutzes, against a background of their friends and relatives who are also not entirely socially adept. Most especially so the eternally young sex-bomb grandmother, whose psychotic episodes and homicidal tendencies paint a much more cheering picture of senescence than we normally expect.



PRETTY FACE

Self-centered dim bulb high school karate club leader wakes from a coma more than a year after a disastrous traffic accident. Psychotic plastic surgeon Dr. Jun Manabe has worked on him during that time, and restored him to normal appearance.

The problem is that Dr. Manabe didn't know who he was working on, and has rebuilt his face to exactly resemble the girl that our hero had a schoolboy crush on........ Who, with her family, are now convinced that the long-lost twin sister has finally returned after running away several months ago. Albeit with some gaps in her memory.
Doctor Manabe wants to finish the job - a full sex change, with some nips, tucks, inserts - the young man will not hear of it. Meanwhile, everybody is convinced that he is indeed a girl.

It's a straightforward story about your basic gender-bending cross-dressing ultra-cute border-line hermaphrodite, in other words. With plenty of scope for high camp, high jinks, and high drama.

It just isn't particularly good.

By the end of volume two there is little more there than a tale featuring a cast of sexy girls drawn in a stereotypic fashion, with frequent panty shots, panic about being discovered, drooling schoolboys from the karate club (who do not realize that the object of their affection is their former leader), and scenes of amusing discomfit.
This is scarcely worth a second glance - I doubt I will purchase any further volumes.



GHOST TALKER'S DAYDREAM

Small violent teenage albino necromancing dominatrix solves crimes. Great story, surprisingly low level of fan-service (Fan Service: curvy thighs, tight cotton panties, lacy bra edges, etcetera - in this case some rather startling outfits that leave almost nothing to the imagination while nevertheless leaving everything to the imagination).

Humour: What do you do when you're not wearing panties, because a stalker who broke into your apartment stole them all (leaving several thousand yen in their place), and you stumble and land on your posterior, your short dress flipped up to expose your paipan to a garage full of startled mechanics?

Do you A) explain that no underwear and no pubic hair is healthy, good for the circulation; B) inform them you are merely obeying your dying mom's last wish; C) kill all witnesses and dispose of their bodies in the trunk of a car; or D) furiously act as if nothing out of the ordinary happened.

The answer, it turns out, is D.

High heels are dangerous. I've always thought so. This proved it.

A kinui is a daemon rope that serves it's mistress, and will only feed on a victim if she permits it. Normally it is hidden on her body, masquerading as typical Japanese rope-bondage art, interwoven and connecting like a complicated and symmetrical cats-cradle tightly wound around the torso and the fatty thighs.

Mmmmmm, fatty thighs.