801 Media 2011 - 1+ volumes
www.guiltpleasure.com
I bought In These Words for two reasons: first for the amazing artwork and second for the interesting background to its creation. It's a collaborative work by writer 'Kichiku Neko' and illustrator 'TogaQ' (aka Jo Chen), a Taiwanese duo who are now based in the US (at least, Chen is, not sure on the Neko's whereabouts). They started off by self-publishing In These Words in English and Chinese but then somewhere along the line they got picked up by Libre, a big publisher of BL in Japan, and got serialised in Be x Boy Gold magazine, which boasts the likes of Viewfinder and Haru wo Daite Ita among its pages. Possibly the first foreign mangaka to be published by Libre, their reputation preceded them and when American publisher DMP got ahold of the title for their 801 line I was eager to check out their work.
The artwork is gorgeous; if you're a fan of art in manga then this title is well worth your money on the art alone. The 801 book includes several double-page colour inserts of Chen's beautiful colour illustrations. If you're looking for a story that's a little different from the usual BL fare then this is definitely worth checking out because, oh yes, it's different. The story is about a psychiatrist (or psychologist?) facing off a sadistic serial killer; the story is dark, graphically violent and not for the squeamish.
On the basis of the stellar art and the unconventional storyline I'm tempted to push up my rating of this title to a 7, however, the quality of the writing and storyboarding just doesn't match up so overall it gets a fairly average 6. The premise is interesting, the characters are potentially interesting, however the whole thing falls rather flat for me and at no point did the story nor the characters really engage me. I had a real problem with the structure of the story and the pacing. There are two narratives going on, the main one where the psychiatrist meets the killer in a police safe house to extract a confession of his crimes, and a second narrative that's made up of what could be the psychiatrist's nightmares or memories or premonitions - he's not sure what they are and hell if I had any idea. The nightmare scenes are interspersed with the main narrative and the result is a very disjointed plot and erratic pacing. Perhaps when more of the story is revealed in the next volume then things will make more sense but volume one left me very confused.
Another big problem I had was with the utter lack of romance in the story. So ok, you don't really want to get all that close with a killer but there was no spark of anything between the main characters, no whiff of any Stockholm Syndrome developing yet nominally this is supposed to be a BL story. There are several graphic sex scenes that are part of the nightmare narrative (possibly memories?) but these are proper rape scenes that are violent and devoid of intimacy and all about power play. Frankly, there's nothing remotely sexy about these scenes and the whole tone of the story is rather cold and clinical, set in part by the attitude of the psychiatrist, who's the cool, calm, analytic type, and not helped at all by the methodical unimpassioned way the killer goes about his raping and killing.
Volume one fell rather short of expectations but the story is still interesting enough to leave me curious to find out what happens next and I will be buying the next volume whenever it comes out.
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