Comics / Manga / Yaoi Manga

Yaoi Manga

   Yaoi mangas are created by female cartoonists and read by women in Japan. They contain romantic stories involving men who do not always identify as gays even if for most observers they are. In North America, the readership for these simple stories, often following a common pattern, is both homosexual and female.   

Yaoi in the West, started as this obscure and niche manga genre that was almost illicit and controversial. It featured stories involving young gay men. Today, the situation is different. Yaoi is one of the most popular and influential comic genre. The few publishers who dared released Yaoi almost ten years ago, did so under other imprint to not affect their corporate image. For example, Blu Manga was an imprint of Tokyopop that released Yaoi comics in North America. SuBLime, is a division of Viz Mmedia.

Artifice by Yaoi911

But I argue that yaoi has both promoted a viable alternative scene of North American and related comics featuring queer characters and has become its own genre with its own followers. Yaoi is no longer an obscure intricacy followed by a few fans. It even has its own established comic conventions. Before yaoi, most comics featuring queer characters were overtly sexual and probably very close to pornography. While some yaoi does have a lot of porn, much of it does not. The relationship aspect between the characters is what counts most for many readers and creators. Yaoi allows gender bending between characters where readers of different genders can still relate to a story featuring two male leads.

What yaoi has done is allow a new generation of North American cartoonists to create similar comics intended for a queer-friendly audience. For example, the Adventures of TJ and Amal follow roughly the typical yaoi genre, visually and story-wise, while being a local American product. Many of these new comics which are part of the burgeoning nouveau comics scene have originated from the Web and gained more street credibility in print later.

Yaoi’s popularity allowed North American creators to experiment with queer-related comics while understanding that an existing audience would appreciate and consume such works. Another popular comic series which owes much of its success to yaoi is The Young Protectors. The Young Protectors mixes the super her genre with yaoi, creating a product very familiar to North American audiences with a focus on stories rarely addressed by large publishers.

New yaoi contents continues to come from Japan regularly. It’s popularity has allowed a specialization in contents such as bara, which is more about gay pornographic stories and boy love (BL), which has less sexual overtones. Meanwhile, yaoi continues to sit in the middle road of the Japanese queer comics scene.

Hervé St-Louis, August 10, 2015

Last Updated: November 10, 2023 - 14:53