Earthian by Yun Kouga

Earthian
Yun Kouga
Four volumes, three currently available

I read a lot of shounen ai manga. A lot. I started reading out of curiosity -- Romances featuring two male protagonists, written by and for a female audience? What a strange phenomenon! -- but something must have resonated for me. Now a majority of the shoujo (girls') series that I pick up are shounen ai or at least suggestive of shounen ai in tone.

As someone interested in the shounen ai genre as a cultural phenomenon, I bumped into repeated references to Earthian, which is considered by many to be a classic of the genre. I was very excited when Blu started releasing Earthian in translation. The presentation itself is excellent. The manga have beautiful, pearlescent, textured covers and several full-color page inserts, and the first volume alone is 390 pages long, making it nearly twice as long as the average manga volume.

However, this is an early work by the mangaka (artist/author), and it shows. The basic story is that two angels have been sent from Eden to investigate the Earthians. Kagetsuya is collecting minuses, or reasons that Earthians deserve to be destroyed. Chihaya, a kind angel with (gasp) black hair and wings, collects pluses and believes Earthians deserve to be spared. The two angels work together as a team, despite the seeming conflict between their assignments. Eventually, they are going to fall in love with each other even though homosexuality is a crime in Eden, as is repeated ad nauseum throughout the first volume. The first volume is very episodic in nature, presenting several different short stories set in different locales around the world. There are hints of continuing story lines and implications of intrigue back in Eden, but in the first volume, these come to nothing more than suggestions of a larger plot.

The artwork is good for an early work by an artist, but not outstanding. The style favors thin linework, and close-ups of characters predominate most pages. This led me to the occasional confusion when trying to figure out where various characters stood in relation to one another when scenes were shown from a greater distance. Ordinarily, hazy proximics don't bother me that much, but I was already having trouble telling some characters apart from each other, so it caused me to stumble over particular panels. Also, the fonts chosen by Blu, although pretty, are sometimes hard to read, especially when large amounts of text needed to be fit into small boxes. As I understand, the differences between various characters became stronger as the series went on, and that particular problem may not extend to later volumes. However, I was not sufficiently enthralled by the story to continue reading past volume two, so I cannot say whether that proved to be the case for myself.

Borrow it, or engage in some standing and reading at the bookshop, if you are particularly interested in the history of the genre. If shounen ai isn't your thing, just give it a miss. This isn't the story that will convert a non-fan.