IC in a Sunflower

I read too many new series.  This one’s a one-shot though, so now I’m finished with it.  I was hesitant to pick this up because I hated Doll so much while I was reading it.  I haven’t picked up anything else by Mihara (well, except for Alice Addict, I really like her color illustrations) even though Tokyopop’s been publishing a number of series by her.  I picked up this one because I seem to remember that it was Doll-related, and it is.  It’s got one story with Vanilla, a character from Doll, in it.  The rest of the short stories are unrelated, but they are, however, AMAZING.

I did not regret my purchase starting with page one.  The first story is about a future where noone likes sex anymore.  More and more people are having kids by artificial insemination, and it’s gotten to the point where mandatory sex education is taught in schools.  The kind of sex education where the kids watch porn in class and study playboys at night.  One of the first lines involves the main character’s parents giving him a magazine and telling him they wanted him to look at the pictures instead of reading the articles.  A girl helps the main character study at one point by giving him a blowjob at school.  One teacher walks in on them and gets the principal, but the principal seems to be tickled that such a thing happened.

This turns into some vague commentary about the link between love and sex and how perhaps there is no love in this future, but while this boring diatribe is going on at the very end, the main character and his friend are blowing up condoms into balloons and releasing them.  The name of the story is “Keep Those Condoms Away From Our Kids.”

This is just the first story, people!  I only actually disliked one, the very last one which was boring and heavy-handed in the same way that Doll stories were, but even that one had an awesome twist that made it a hundred times better than anything in Doll.  These stories try to say as much about people as Doll stories did, but there’s a ton more action, and the plots are more interesting.  Even the story about the Doll was more a murder story with a kind of sweet relationship.  What Mihara is trying to say lays heavily over most of the stories, and I do hate the moralistic tone, but again, the stories are so good that I can forgive this, and often the message is much less abstract than it is in Doll.

What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that it is awesome and I liked it better than the other series I read by her.