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Full Ahead! Coco, volume 15, cover art

Man/boy romance in Full Ahead! Coco

2021-02-27 by ケイ Leave a Comment

Volume 15 of Full Ahead! Coco (フルアヘッド!ココ) by Yonehara Hideyuki (米原秀幸) contains the most beautiful example of the kind of man/boy romance that is so common in mainstream boys’ manga. The series is about how the orphan Coco Felkena finds an alternative family in the form of a gang of pirates. He is especially close to the captain, Crazy Barts, a long-haired man in his twenties who always struts around shirtless.

Boy wants to be taught

Volume 15 of Full Ahead! Coco starts in the middle of a fight, in which captain Barts is hurt badly by the enemy. In a heart-wrenching frame, Coco, tears flowing from his eyes, begs of the enemy:

There are so many things I still want to learn from Barts! Please … Don’t kill him … Don’t kill him!!

Full Ahead! Coco, volume 15, chapter 127, page 79.
Crying boy.

This brilliantly captures a typical dynamic in man/boy relations, namely teaching: Boys want to learn from men in order to become men themselves. This has been the theme of numerous coming-of-age rituals all over the world, most notably among the Dorians in ancient Greece, where a boy and a man went on a three month trip together, during which the man taught the boy to hunt. The theme is almost satirically spelled out in the superhero anime My Hero Academy (僕のヒーローアカデミア), where Midoriya is taught by All Might.

Barts survives and the band recuperates in a nearby guesthouse, all in one room, like the alternative family that they are. Barts’s swords are broken, and he needs to go on a trip to fix them or get new ones. He declares that he’ll go with Coco, only the two of them. Close-up on Coco’s surprised face: “Only the two of us?”

“Only the two of us?”

Preparations are made and they sail off. Coco narrates to the reader:

For the first time I’ll go alone with Barts on a sailing trip. My body has never felt this excited!

P. 106

The next chapter begins with a full-page illustration of the ship surrounded by the ocean, and the exclamation: “Only the two of us!”

“Only the two of us!”

Man and boy get naked

Chapter 129 is all about the everyday life of the boy and the man onboard the Sweet Madonna. Barts puts Coco behind the ship’s wheel (舵/かじ) and goes fishing from the gunwale while Coco endures the challenges of trying to navigate the ship according to Barts’s instructions: He has to turn the wheel in the right direction the right number of times depending on the direction of the wind and the position of the sun. It’s exhausting and doesn’t go too well in the beginning. The ship goes round and round and Barts taunts him until the boy has had enough:

I can’t navigate!! It’s because of your crappy teaching!

P. 119

In my reading, this is all part of Barts’s intuitive education. The boy has mellowed out through some initial hardships, and is ready to learn. “Hey, Coco”, Barts says, sits himself down next to the boy, and starts explaining:

Do you know why I’m always shirtless? It’s in order to feel the wind and the sun on my body. The direction and strength of the wind, the position of the sun – it’s all caught by my body and transferred to the wheel.

P. 120
Barts explains the logic of being shirtless at sea to Coco.

He explains a bit more and then jumps off the ledge and leaves the boy alone to ponder what he has heard. Coco repeats the captain’s words to himself:

“To know with my body … To remember with my body …”

P. 121

Coco glances at the ship’s wheel again. Before we know it, he throws off his shirt and jumps up behind the helm.

Coco throws off his shirt.

The wind and the sun caress the boy’s shirtless body as he learns the skill of navigating a ship. As the sun sets, he falls asleep at the wheel. Barts, who has been watching over him, takes the boy in his arms and carries him to a makeshift bed on the deck. As he does so, there is a flashback to the scene in chapter 127, with the crying Coco exclaiming that “there are so many things I still want to learn from Barts”. We understand that this is exactly what has happened here: The man has imparted his knowledge to the boy. After Barts has put a blanket over the sleeping Coco and taken over the wheel, he looks at the stars and concludes that they have drifted way too much west, but I guess that’s part of letting the boy learn by doing.

Halfnaked boy and man engaged in education.

Next day, Coco continues navigating. Maybe several days have passed when Coco sees something in the horizon and yells at Barts:

Look Barts! Land! Laaaand!!

P. 126
“Look Barts! Land! Laaaand!!”

The boy has taken them ashore. The trip that they undertook, “only the two of them”, has been a success: Teaching and learning has taken place, and they have come out on the other side. The cover page of the next chapter solidifies this impression: In an artistic watercolour painting, the shirtless boy and man face the reader with confident smiles. We did it, they seem to say. Only the two of us.

Man on boy.

I found this whole chapter not only very beautiful, but also important in that it instils the teaching aspect of man/boy relationships in the reader, and it does so not in a subcultural shota comic, but in a mainstream manga that was serialised in a major publication. There is a clear man/boy eroticism bubbling under the surface here, enhanced by the theme of getting undressed as an integral part of the learning process.

You stole my man!

Your typical action-packed boys’ manga adventure follows, where Coco and Barts get the chance to save each other’s lives. As they sail away again in chapter 131, the boy behind the helm again, the training continues. Barts tells Coco that although they are pirates, there is one thing that a pirate must never steal, according to some unwritten code of conduct. He doesn’t get to tell Coco what it is, because they realise they are followed by another pirate ship.

As they board the enemy ship, Barts is taken captive but Coco manages to hide, and even finds his way into the abandoned captain’s cabin. There he finds some kind of expensive looking necklace framed on the wall. As the enemy captain is holding a sword to Barts’s neck on the deck, Coco rushes out and dangles the necklace outside the gunwale, threatening to drop it into the sea if they don’t release Barts. Everyone looks at Coco in shock. The enemy captain walks up to the boy, slaps him in the face so that he falls backwards onto the deck, hand still clenching the necklace.

“Listen up, you brat”, the enemy captain says. He explains that there is a certain thing that pirates don’t steal from each other, something that is more important than life itself, namely that necklace, which has been traded down through generations and represents his father’s memento. “Oh yeah? Well you did the same,” the boy counters. “You stole Barts from me!!” The captain is obviously moved by the implication of the boy’s words, and they decide to trade the necklace for Barts – both “more important than life itself”.

“Don’t steal Barts from me!!”

After this gooey love story, the volume ends with another relaxing chapter, in which Coco and Barts disembark on a female island where Coco will learn to cook, but well, that’s another story!

Filed Under: Commercial Tagged With: boy eroticism, Full Ahead! Coco, mainstream manga, shōnen, shota, Yonehara Hideyuki, 米原 秀幸

Jumbor Angzengbang 2, ユンボル 1, manga cover art

Jumbor and the eroticism of mainstream boys’ manga

2020-12-22 by ケイ Leave a Comment

I stumbled upon Jumbor (ユンボル) by Takei Hiroyuki (武井宏之) at a Mandarake in Tokyo in October 2017. Jumbor is a dystopian manga set in a future ruled by various construction syndicates which fight each other with heavy duty construction machinery. The resistance movement get their hands on a jumbor, which is a mix of human and machine originally used to mine the valuable substance jumborite. This particular Jumbor, model 11D, is a boy: Jumbor Baru.

But enough of the background – just look at these striking covers! One of the volumes even comes with a full colour fold-out with the shirtless Jumbor, pin-up style:

Fold-out in Jumbor Angzengbang, volume 2 (ユンボル 安全版, 全2巻), 2010.

Jumbor Baru has been frozen for several years, so when he finally wakes up, he has the body of a 10-year-old boy, despite he is actually a teenager. After having examined the huge mechanical hands and feet he has been equipped with, he glances down at his crotch and concludes with sweat drops in his face:

But that thing …! It’s still small, hasn’t grown at all!!!

しかもコイツは…!小せえし生えてねえ!!!

Takei Hiroyuki (武井宏之). 2010. Jumbor (ユンボル), volume 1, p. 87-88.
Jumbor Baru discovers his prepubescent penis
Jumbor Baru discovers his prepubescent penis, p. 86-87.
Baby elephant in diapers symbolises small penis
This discovery is illustrated with the symbolic image of a baby elephant in diapers, p. 88.

The jokes on the boy’s penis continue when Jumbor realises that the woman who has awaken him is in fact Princess Rivetta, who he knew as a child – when they were both children:

“That means, you must be that tiny little Princess Rivetta, right?”

“Right. Speaking of tiny little things, how about covering yourself up, Jumbor Baru.”

「するとやっぱりあんたはあの小せえリベッタ姫なのか…?」

「さあな。あれこれ聞く前にその小せえモノを隠したらどうだユンボル・バル」

Takei Hiroyuki (武井宏之). 2010. Jumbor (ユンボル), volume 1, p. 100-101.
Jumbor 1, p. 101

So it’s small. Super tiny. 小せえ! But that is compensated by a huge shovel, many times his own size, that grows out of one of Jumbor Baru’s mechanical hands the first time he’s confronted by an enemy. He’s surprised by this sudden power, which he was not aware of and which he can’t control well in the beginning. Princess Rivetta observes him contentedly in the foreground as he battles with his shovel: “So that’s his secret power.”

This is what awaits all boys. Their bodies will transform and they will have a hard time mastering the new powers that demand attention within them. I come to think of the anime D.N.Angel, where 14-year-old Niwa Daisuke transforms into a “phantom thief” at certain occasions. Or why not Momonari Junta, the good-for-nothing rascal who turns into “Mega-Playboy” in DNA2. Just like Jumbor Baru, Daisuke and Junta can’t control the powers they’ve been equipped with. What we’re seeing is the struggle of puberty and newly awakened sexuality, as manifested in a shovel, a phantom thief, and a playboy.

But back to Jumbor. Even after he has got dressed, Jumbor Baru is running around in several sizes too big bib trousers that expose his shirtless upper body. This imagery is erotic, but not erotic enough to be designated as such. It reminds quite a bit of Takei’s hit manga and anime Shaman King (シャーマンキング) from 1998 (and onwards), whose 13-year-old boy protagonist Asukara Yoh (麻倉 葉) similarly has an exposed chest under an unbuttoned shirt:

Asukara Yoh (麻倉 葉) in Shaman King.

Moe! We might call this imagery titillating, but titillating for who? For boy readers with a latent erotic interest in their peers (and themselves)? Or for older readers? The lack of furigana makes me think that the manga is not aimed at too young readers.

On the female side, people have argued that the girl characters in series like Sailor Moon were sexed up to cater to a secondary (or maybe even primary) target group of adult men, beyond the obvious audience of teenage girls (see Patrick W. Galbraith: Otaku and the struggle for imagination in Japan, Duke University Press 2019, p. 113–115). Is something similar at play in mainstream boys’ (shōnen) manga? I think it’s quite obvious that a series like Made in Abyss (on Netflix of all places) flirts quite shamelessly with both shotacon and lolicon, with Reg – like Jumbor, a boy with robot hands – being one of the most popular characters in shota fan art.

The shota genre makes explicit what is implicit in mainstream manga. No one would claim that Hunter x Hunter and other mainstream series featuring and made for boys have an erotic undertone, and anyone who claims that would not be able to prove it. And that’s exactly what makes mainstream manga so interesting – because you have to read between the lines!

Please contribute with additional examples.

Filed Under: Book, Commercial, Research Tagged With: boy eroticism, Jumbor, Made in Abyss, manga, Patrick W. Galbraith, shōnen, Takei Hiroyuki, ユンボル, 少年, 武井宏之

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Reference library

ショタコンのゆりかご (book cover)

ショタコンのゆりかご

Author: ぶどううり くすこ

An essay on the origins of shota, published as a dōjinshi.

国際おたく大学―1998年 最前線からの研究報告

国際おたく大学―1998年:最前線からの研究報告

Authors: 岡田 斗司夫, 渡辺 由美子

An anthology on “otakuology” that contains Watanabe Yumiko’s important shota study.

吉本たいまつ:腐男子にきく。

腐男子にきく。

Author: 吉本 たいまつ

An interview study on male fans of BL and yaoi, published as a dōjinshi.

The Syotaroh by まんだ 林檎

The Syotaroh

Author: まんだ 林檎

An impressive work on the early shota subculture.

エロマンガ・スタディーズ

エロマンガ・スタディーズ

Author: 永山 薫

One of the main resources on adult manga.

ショタリポート①

ショタリポート①

The first part of an interview study of shota fans.

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