Skyscrapers of Oz

Picking up Skyscrapers of Oz you do not at first glance notice the friendly and rather unobtrusive words which run along the bottom of the cover. Words which read:

"ABSOLUTELY NOT FOR CHILDREN"

I must say, I was almost be comforted by this warning. All too often I'm disappointed by the restraint that yaoi demonstrates; namely by the fact that the culmination of two hundred pages of angst is a very romantic, and very chaste, kiss on a moonlit balcony. Opening Skyscrapers of Oz I discovered an entire page dedicated to warning me of the adult nature of the material within; scenes of rape, sex, and violence. Well here's a good start, I thought.

Yes, here was trash indeed. For all intents and purposes, I was holding yaoi porn. It was trash at its trashiest, smut at its smuttiest, yaoi at the height (or I suppose depths) of its gritty hormone-driven plotlessness. Even the pages of this slim little volume felt like they were printed on cheap newspaper, almost as if to increase the seediness of the whole experience. This was the most enjoyment I'd got out of a manga novel without opening it in quite some time. But all spells are eventually broken, and it did so for me when I actually began to read.

What little of a plot this manga has I suppose I must try and consider. Our two leads, Yoichi and Mari, work as "handymen" (See? Sounds like a porn film already), which as far as I can tell means that they'll do anything for anyone as long as they get paid. This runs from doing shopping for little old ladies, to seducing young men and making videos for their jealous partners. I got a feeling that the plot would lean towards the latter rather early on (probably around the time Yoichi and Mari woke up in bed together naked, only for Mari's brother to walk in and throw a tantrum because he was being left out). Anyway, to cut a long story short, they pick up a case which involves seducing a young blonde uke (for various convoluted reasons that turn out to be lies) and said young blonde boy turns out to be more trouble than he's worth. Pseudo-drama ensues along with some very badly developed angst. Yoichi and Mari's brother shag constantly, Mari conceals dirty urges towards their blonde uke target, and most of the characters end up being kidnapped by an evil gang and threatened with rape and bondage at some point or another. Then there's a bonus scene at the end. With more sex. You get the idea.

Now the surprising thing is that none of this bothered me in the slightest. In fact the utter direness of the plot in all of its badly conceived and increasingly preposterous glory kept me thoroughly entertained. No, my problems with this arose somewhere else entirely, and they run as follows:

• Mari's younger brother looks like a girl.
• Their quarry, blonde uke, also looks like a girl.
• Even manly seme Yoichi, in several frames, looks like a girl.

Are you getting an inkling as to my problem?

To make matters worse, Mari himself is simply unattractive, he constantly has either the most horrible expressions imaginable crossing his features, or is drawn so angularly it's plain disturbing. On top of this, the characters' bodies are all drawn ludicrously out of proportion. Yoichi has enormous shoulders and rippling abs, but the slimmest hips you've ever seen, and no six pack. Now, I can forgive a lack of anatomical correctness, hell at times I'll embrace it, but do you know what is truly, truly criminal about it all? It doesn't look good. All of these stupid proportions on various characters, and all of these sex scenes, and none of them ever look good in any of them. It's like porn with ugly people in it. All that time and effort put into something that's of absolutely no use to anyone.

Now you can call me superficial, and you'd be right. In this particular instance, when the manga is serving no purpose other than eye-candy (and with a plot like that, what other purpose is it going to serve?), I expect the characters to be hot. And they aren't. So what redeeming features does this manga have? Well, occasionally Mira looks like a man, and when he does he's kinda hot. I... yes, I think that's it. The manga also has one good line which I'll impart for posterity. At one point somebody finds some rather compromising evidence on Mari's computer and he confronts Mari with it, who pauses for a moment before giving up, and saying, "It's exactly how it looks". Well I thought it was a good line.

Other than that, don't buy this unless you like a good laugh and lots of sex scenes with ukes that look like girls.