This week’s column offers something for everyone, from the hard-core yaoi enthusiast to the jazz-loving seinen junkie, with reviews of Astral Project (CMX), a new thriller from the creator of Old Boy; Mister Mistress (Aurora/Deux), a love story about a boy and an incubus; and Ral Ω Grad (Viz), an adventure series that’s as fixated on breasts as it is on demon-slaying.

Astral Project, Vol. 1

By marginal and Syuji Takeya
CMX, 232 pp.
Rating: Mature (18+)

I’ve owned some great jazz albums in my day, but I can’t say that I’ve ever had an out-of-body experience while listening to Betty Carter or McCoy Tyner. So I felt a little twinge of envy when Masahiko, the protagonist of Astral Project, discovered a jazz album so transcendent that he actually left his physical body and began floating through the night sky. That CD was the last recording Masahiko’s sister heard before her untimely death. As Masahiko begins asking logical questions–where did the recording come from? did my sister die while having an OOB experience?–he finds himself tangling with other souls on the astral plane and a motley assortment of criminals and hardcore jazz collectors in the material world. (In one of the series’ more clever touches, the recording seems to be a performance by free jazz innovator Albert Ayler, whose premature death in 1970 fueled speculation that a jealous rival bumped him off, a la Salieri and Mozart.)

Astral Project might have been an indigestible stew of pseudo-science and Deep Thoughts About Jazz, but marginal spins a ripping yarn, grounding its more fantastic elements in the gritty realism of Tokyo’s red light district. He immerses us in the story to such a degree that we learn things as Masahiko does; we’re never one step ahead of our protagonist, a common problem in thrillers. Syuji Takeya’s artwork won’t appeal to everyone, as it sometimes has a rough, sketchy quality that doesn’t mesh well with the dark, Photoshopped backgrounds. But Takeya creates a memorable assortment of faces and bodies that suggest the seediness of Masahiko’s world more readily than dialog could.

Highly recommended, even if you don’t have a big stack of Ornette Coleman LPs in your living room.

–Reviewed by Katherine Dacey

Mister Mistress, Vols. 1-2

By Rize Shinba
Published by Aurora/Deux
Rating: Mature (18+)

Many yaoi manga fall into very predictable traps. Some feature weepy, resisting ukes that are always running away from their relationships and are in complete denial about everything (e.g. Only The Ring Finger Knows, Our Kingdom). The other extreme is the hyper-sexualized world where everyone is magically gay, absurdly gorgeous, and wants nothing more than to have sex with the protagonist. These two “plotlines” are all but stolen from shojo manga and hentai respectively, and boy, do they get old. Even great yaoi manga have a hard time reconciling good stories, comedy/tragedy, and eroticism. Take, for example, a title like ANAL: All Nippon Airlines: it’s hilarious, but hardly deep or erotic.

It’s the rare manga like Mister Mistress that helps the genre stand on its own. Mister Mistress succeeds brilliantly due to its very convincing school setting (full of mostly straight people – I’m looking at you Gakuen Heaven!), terrific art, and hilarious writing and translation. This hilarious story follows a normal high school boy Fujimaru whose house is haunted by an incubus, who of course needs Fujimaru’s hot loving to survive. It’s sexy, laugh-out-loud funny, and interesting all at once. And did I mention that the translation is excellent? Kudos to both Rize Shinba and Deux Press on this one! I’ll leave you with am out-of-context line from Mister Mistress:

Incubus: Your lust and horniness are extremely delicious.

And that friends, sums up the series better than I ever could. It’s not going to be the next Kizuna, but its pretty fantastic. If you dig yaoi, buy this series posthaste!

–Reviewed by Isaac Hale

Ral Ω Grad, Vol. 2

By Tsuneo Takano and Takeshi Obata
Viz, 200 pp.
Rating: Mature

Volume two of Ral Ω Grad offers more cheeky fan service, beautiful artwork, entertaining storylines, and cool characters as Ral and the gang fight a set of woman-hungry bricks and travel across the ocean, all while seeing a bunch of breasts along the way. The volume itself is quite heavy, introducing us to another main character, Ganette the White Tiger, as well as giving Ral and Kafka a chance to showcase new abilities.

Many readers may know manga-ka Takeshi Obata from the popular Death Note series and if you think he did a good job on that, you’re in for a treat. Ral Ω Grad is an extremely stylish piece of art whose subject matter gives Obata a chance to show us how detailed he can really be. The writing, on the other hand, isn’t the best. Ral Ω Grad depicts an extremely complex world, but the characters are flat and one-sided with exaggerated personality traits. Ral’s obsession with boobs is similar to Kosaku’s eating habits—it just gets old after awhile. However, the series’ fantastic art overshadows the shallow writing, making it a fun, easy read.

–Reviewed by Sam Kusek