latest comic idea i came up with while talking to @missiletoe: ratatouille but instead of a rat who can cook it is a frog who writes the most amazing yaoi. it is titled "frogjoshi." everyone says, "how can a frog write yaoi? what does a frog know about gay love?" and yet, she writes the most beautiful BL stories of all time. a world-renowned yaoi critic reads her novel, and is moved to tears having been reminded of the first yaoi she ever read, long ago, before she even knew what yaoi was. she demands to meet the author. they bring out the frog. roll credits
since i can't answer myself so well, what would you say are asada nemui's distinctive storytelling traits and on a personal matter if you'd like what makes you like her stories? not so much tropes but running themes, art and such. i hope it's not too heavy of a question and thanks ^_^
Hi, this is a great question. For anyone with the patience to read all this I think it might help explain what makes Asada Nemui such an intriguing manga artist. (especially without the "it's because X reminded me of Y! - type analysis that occurs very frequently in english fandom communities)
There's a lot of images in this post, but it's not too spoiler-ish.
Comments about art
The first aspect of Asada's art I would want to praise endlessly are the page layouts. Dear, My God was one of the first stories I read by her and the flow of the panels is what really stuck out to me. I like using this sequence of pages as an example - can you guess what's going on?
I removed all of the dialogue and SFX, and it's so well laid out that the sight-to-panel direction, background design and expressions of the characters are enough to understand what's happening. It almost feels like you're looking at a scene from a movie or storyboard.
Text version:
While reading The Sound of the Waves, a page describing the plot of a writer's story more or less summarizes Asada's layout style. It generally begins with an establishing shot before laying out the rest of the scene, which with a longer story may take a few more pages to conclude.
The divisions of pages seems to average around four to seven panels, and pages with three or fewer panels show up very sparingly - likely saved for more impactful scenes.
(I'll just take a second here to add how much I love that she generally sticks to one shade of screentone. Limiting the palette to just three values is a great way to create shadows and dramatic lighting effects!)
Asada's direction is very focused on telling a story - there is always some type of visual cue that the scene is actively present and happening in front of us, the readers. I like this continuity compared to a series that might have excessive headshots or pages of flashbacks during a scene with a lot of action.
One of my favorite scenes in Sleeping Dead is in the second volume, when Mamiya is out in his van and attempting to construct a conversation. It fills an entire page, but his entire monologue could have been condensed into one "thinking" panel.
It doesn't necessarily look bad like if it were like this, but Asada intentionally uses the entire page to emphasize Mamiya's expressions, his awkwardness as he slowly loses confidence in himself. (Plus he's actively driving and looking at the road.) I like that this is a very private scene that reveals the inner character he tries to hide during the majority of the first volume.
I also like that she understands the importance of a readable layout enough to redraw areas that might be confusing to look at, like this one from the magazine version of Sleeping Dead (left side) :
In the last panel it's difficult to tell who's talking, because there are four detached bubbles and you can't see Sada or Mamiya. I wasn't sure if Sada was talking in the first bubble since it's directly below him, but the second seemed like Mamiya since it's drawn so awkwardly. For the paperback release she added a line to connect the two bubbles - obviously it's Mamiya saying both and becoming nervous as he brings up the possibility of having more sexual activities with Sada.
If you noticed the changes in the other panels of that page it also goes into her tendency to do redraws. Some of them look quite different after they've been changed - from the series I've read I noticed major redrawing for Dear, My God, the older short stories republished in Ai, Sei, and even Takatora and the Omegas (though Asada credited changes in that one to the fact that she's now working 100% digitally).
My opinion for these is kind of mixed, sometimes they do look better and sometimes I prefer her original style. This one from Dean My Love that appears in Ai, Sei is a crime lol.
There was a two-volume manga called Mangaka Gohan Nishi (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Comic Artists) published in 2015, and it has one page comics by mangaka discussing food they eat. Asada appears in the second volume and her page mentions watching movies.
(basically it's about being bad at / injured by stovetop cooking so she prefers the safety of the microwave. But in the unidentified movie the characters make an explosive device with a microwave…)
I would undoubtedly say films are a large influence to her, and I've caught some parallels/references in her work, but it's kind of a disservice to only point out similarities in characters or genre tropes rather than her skill as an artist and storyteller.
During the last couple years Asada's also been fairly active on Twitter where she shares concept art and extra comics that add more to what she was limited to write in the published works.
For Takatora she's even been live-streamed the planning and inking of its (as of now) upcoming chapter on Pixiv Sketch. The series already has over two dozen pages of extra content judging by a numbered page she shared on Twitter.
Overall I appreciate that on top of having a high output she seems to care a lot about the quality of content her readers are getting. Not every artist makes redraws for their series on top of doing multiple serializations and lots of fanart/doujin content.
(And she has made a lot of fanart and doujinshi. For 10+ years.)
Comments about storytelling
I'm probably going to sound more rambly here, because I'm not a writer or a critic. Regardless of which series I enjoyed or disliked, I think most of them have an element of pushing boundaries in BL manga.
As one Japanese reviewer said when commenting about Sleeping Dead - Asada's manga are the type you want to recommend anyone to read...except you can't.
I think it goes without saying that the focus of sex in her manga can be a barrier, but there is enough range in her work that a reader (with some help) would be able to find a story with an amount of sexual content they'd be comfortable with. I could definitely see Asada working on more non-BL titles like The Swerve, Yoi and A Friend's Funeral, but to be blunt...she seems to really enjoy drawing men having sex.
Boundary-pushing can be apparent in most of her manga, especially when it starts as early as the first chapter. In the least extreme variation, her titles like Sleeping Dead and Call feature somewhat jarring love interests - middle-aged, sexually awkward men that are unconventionally designed compared to other BL love interests.
When the second volume of Sleeping Dead was nominated a Chil-Chil award for its story, Asada shared this illustration of Mamiya in a boxing ring. I love to imagine it as him squaring off with the much more handsome and less follicly-challenged ukes of the other nominated series.
If you check out her earlier series there are a few subjects considered taboo to look at. Sexual violence occurs pretty frequently. Surprisingly (or not, if you've been around long enough), it's not even rape that's considered risky subject matter in BL magazines.
According to a recent interview with Chil-Chil, Asada originally planned to publish Takatora and the Omegas with a different publisher (my guess is Shodensha, since they serialized My Little Inferno in OnBlue), but its inclusion of sexual health topics was considered too extreme:
[Interview translation credit goes to Ikari of Bottom of the Sea Scans, which currently scanlates Takatora and the Omegas.]
Thanks to Canna being willing to publish her more explicit story ideas, we might be able to see how far she planned to go with Takatora. The published chapters have already broached subjects including hysterectomies, abortion and sexual autonomy. I think this situation with Takatora has parallels to the struggles female shoujo mangaka faced in the early decades of manga publishing for girls.
The magazine Canna tends to serialize BL stories that include elements of science fiction and fantasy, which I think has made it a place where artists like Asada can have less restriction in their storytelling.
But...I don't want to praise Asada just for tackling difficult topics. Going back to the comments about page design, there's a huge focus on dialogue. Characters are frequently conversing and making eye contact with each other. She's amazing at writing characters with unlikable traits that are still enjoyable to read about, or are paired with a partner that helps balance out, or even tolerates their faults.
I think it can be easy to drop a series if it has unlikable characters, but she tends to put them in situations that question their ideologies, and we get to see how they change over the course of the story. Even Asada commented that she's not a huge fan of how the protagonist of Takatora and the Omegas acts:
Takatora could wind up being one of the most extreme examples of an unlikable protagonist, but we'll get to see if his bigoted views are changed as he's challenged by his peers, and as he offers his own support to solve their troubles.
At this point I totally got lost in the Takatora sauce, but other little aspects I love about her manga are the humorous moments, the sometimes getting too over-her-head writing, and endings that can be unexpectedly gut-punching yet written in a way that's the most grounded in reality. And in Sleeping Dead's case, immediately followed by a whiplash of silly extras.
I hope that with Takatora and Yoi - which seemed to have planned out for a while - Asada can continue to do her own thing, because I think it's a much better creative output to make whatever the hell you want instead of conforming to the preferences of the publishers.
I am so thrilled to share that Bottom of the Sea Scans has translated Yuujin no Sougi/Funeral For a Friend - one of the earliest serialized manga by Asada Nemui! It's an existential short story about the relationship between a trio of lifelong friends...with that Asada je ne sais quoi!
This oneshot was serialized in the seinen magazine Monthly Big Gangan, and has not been reprinted since. I came across a copy of the magazine issue on Mercari, which was generously tl'd and edited by Ikari, Tasogare, Yun and the rest of the BotSS crew!
witch hat atelier so far seems to be quite obviously about the disenfranchisement of children in academia and training so why did i only ever hear about those two yaoi men. do men likers even listen to the things they're watching
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