Love Full of Scars

Psyche Delico – Netcomics – 2009 – 1 volume

This is utter madness.  I love it.  I love BL series that don’t take themselves seriously.  It reminds me a lot of Delivery Cupid, except Delivery Cupid is a whole lot more filthy and disturbing than this is.  There’s also All Nippon Air Lines, and to a lesser extent, Selfish Mr. Mermaid, which only had an insane concept and the youngest looking salaryman I’ve ever seen.

This is a collection of short stories.  The first half of the volume has random stories, but the second half all focuses on the same couple, Kanda and Uesaka.  Kanda is one of the funniest BL protagonists I’ve ever seen, with an inner commentary and rich fantasy life where he and his crush Uesaka are the cutest couple in the world, but the things that come out of his mouth are abusive and completely punk-ish.  They regularly beat each other up until Kanda decided to confess.  Or, rather, until Uesaka read between the lines and realized his increasingly weird taunts were pick-up lines.  I love everything about Kanda.  He’s also an unapologetic pervert, and the first two stories have a lot of commentary from him about masturbation.  It’s funny stuff.  The last story in this set focuses on Kanda’s older brother, and is actually the only story in the volume that isn’t humorous.  Both the brother and his partner work at… I don’t know, an okama bar or something, but that’s not commented on.  Not even in the first set of stories, when the elder Kanda runs his brother down in full drag.

The other stories in the volume are all varying degrees of insane and romantic.  Mostly just because the characters are so ridiculous.  The second story in the volume was my favorite of these, and featured two businessmen who were bonding over Muscleman memories.  After a night where they drunkenly wrestle one another, one man misinterprets the conditions when he wakes up to mean that they had copulated.  The double entendres that work for both sex and sweaty drunken wrestling are amazing.  Also, the bonding first started when one man realized the other was the “creator” of one of his favorite Muscleman characters.  I love that older men can bond over memories like this, and I also love that some of those same men created Muscleman characters, then grew up to become popular shounen jump artists.

There’s also a really disturbing/hilarious story about a brother who comes back to Japan after two years abroad to find that his adorable younger brother has grown into a gigantic hairy man.  The thing I love most about this story is that it doesn’t actually slash the two brothers (one of my least favorite plot devices), but instead just makes the older one have constant, bizarre flashbacks to how adorable his younger brother was.  It’s so bizarre I have no words to describe it.

There’s not actually that much sex here.  Mostly, it’s comedy, but I think you’d have to have read a fair number of BL books to enjoy it.  With a name like “Love Full of Scars,” I was expecting some drama-tastic high school romance.  I couldn’t have been more pleased with what I got.  Of course, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, so I can see how it might not be everyone’s cup of tea… but for those looking, it’s good stuff.