Ok today’s manga rec (this is a series now ig) is Lovers’ Kiss by yoshida akimi. Its three two part comics: one GL, one BL, one het romance.
^the cover page for each part is stylized like this, with the French text. Elegant + it shows off a strength of the artist which is their ability to draw Gaze. Like when you’re in a character’s POV looking at another character, you can really see how they feel about that person. Usually it’s done through snipping off the other characters face, making them impenetrable as well as alluring. What are other people thinking? How can we communicate? That’s the stuff the stories are concerned with. And all the characters know each other, so each subsequent story reveals more about behavior that was previously inscrutable. Neat!
Btw none of the endings are pure happy couples together. Bittersweet acceptance is the name of the game. And it’s done really well imo. We (people, everyone) collide and intersect, and sometimes fall apart again, but the remarkable thing is not whether we get a wife out of it; the remarkable thing is that the course of our lives was altered and that we in turn altered someone else’s life.
This comic isn’t explicitly erotica but it’s got sex in it. It’s also got mentions of suicide and incest and csa. I think these matters are handled thoughfully but reader beweader etc. Here’s some pages I think are beautiful:
There are busier pages than this but I love the simplicity of them. I think the mangaka shines with minimally placed lines and moodiness.