I ran across Kou Yoneda's No Touching At All at YaoiRose, a BL-oriented blog that has proven to be a good place to find out what's new and whether it's worth it. Rose liked it, but her review, I think, didn't really do this one justice. (In her defense, her reviews are brief and to the point -- shorter even than these Reviews in Brief.)
Shima, on his first day at his new job, shares the elevator with a man who's desperately hung over and otherwise sort of rough around the edges. Togawa, of course, is his new boss. Their affair is one of the knottiest and most engaging I've run across in BL manga.
I get the impression that this one was very carefully thought out -- it's amazingly well constructed, fairly elliptical, with a lot going on under the surface. Yoneda does an excellent job of playing off assumptions against reality, on both sides colored by the men's own histories. It takes a major crisis for these guys to finally admit their feelings for each other, and yet it all makes perfect sense in the context of the characters and the story.
The drawing is free, confident, and very expressive. The character designs remind me somewhat of Yukimura's rendering of Nao in Love Song for the Miserable -- there's that same kind of openness to the faces. (And Yoneda manages to get character into her renderings as well.) This is one where the cover art is a good reflection of the interior. There's a lot of subtlety in the use of shading and tone that takes the drawing up a level, and the layouts, while fluid and intuitive, add another dimension to the narrative.
I'm busily trying to find more by Yoneda -- this one really impressed me in the best possible way.
From June.
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