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Full disclosure: Ana Two horror comic to be published by Fieldmouse Press Dark room next year. A running joke I have with Ana is that, regardless of the subject matter of her comics, they are always inevitably about power exchange and power relations in kinky relationships. Even his delightfully deranged comic for Diskette Press, yaoi girl, It starts with a ridiculous premise, but then inevitably gets to the same kind of exploration that Ana Two has done in her other comics. This is not a criticism but rather an amusing observation; The artist simply can’t help himself!
yaoi girl is unhinged from the first page, and while I’m not the target audience for its subject matter (women who read children love comics, aka fujoshi), Ana Two skillfully and playfully provides all the story context a reader could need. Aster Zhou is a yaoi enthusiast with a magic ring that allows her to enter the stories she reads in her dreams and allows her to fuck as she pleases. This quickly gets complicated when her new next-door neighbor, Summer Li, gets her hands on the yaoi and Aster’s favorite magic ring. This leads them to fuck each other, in boy form, in a series of shared dreams.
There is a backstory that includes Aster’s teenage crush on Summer and the feeling of betrayal when Summer read Aster’s highly sexual diary. They become neighbors through the whims of fate, but Aster doesn’t reveal his true feelings because experiencing a different yaoi every night is too appealing to turn down. This is the best part of the entire book: Ana Two’s twisted genius in creating so many different yaoi stories is hilarious and yet completely faithful to the genre. There’s a frenetic quality to his storytelling, with big, thick, angular lines and crazy angles to the panels. This sometimes causes confusion while reading, as the order of the panels is not always clearly stated, and this is distracting. For the most part, context clues usually solve these problems, and Ana Two’s use of spot colors (yellow for Aster, pink for Summer) cleverly allows the reader to quickly identify the identity of each woman in the book’s many, many sex scenes.
This speaks to the excellent production values of new Diskette Press managers Dylan Box and Robin Rowe. Their offerings have uniformly been a big step above the previous version of the press, and yaoi girl It is one of his greatest triumphs in that sense. Ana Two’s writing is very sharp, especially in the way the reader comes to deeply sympathize with both characters, even as issues of desire, consent, betrayal, and perversion come to the fore. This isn’t so much a story about kink or power exchange as it is about two vulnerable, sensitive people who eventually find a way to let the other in.