Girls Love Boys' Love

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on August 22, 2006 Sign up now!

by Kai-Ming Cha, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 8/22/2006

Makoto Tateno is a yaoi, or boys' love, manga-ka (author/illustrator) who doesn't mind bucking trends. In a genre dominated by "seme" (aggressor) and "uke" (receiver) characters, Tateno forgoes the role-playing and opts for setting up her protagonists as equals. In Yellow, her first series to be released in the U.S., Goh and Taki are "snatchers," or thieves, who steal back stolen goods for the police--and end up stealing each other's hearts. The series recently concluded, and according to Digital Manga Publishing, Tateno's American publisher, the four-volume series has sold 20,000 copies per volume in the U.S. DMP will be releasing an additional Tateno title, Hero Heel, a romance story about two television actors on a Power Rangers type of show, to be released later this year.

In Japan, Tateno also produces works in the shojo genre, where she got her start. PWCW tracked down Tateno during her visit to Baltimore's Otakon, for this interview. DMP's Japan relations and guest liaison, Amelia Cantlay, translated.

PW Comics Week: Can you share with us your background in manga?

Makoto Tateno: I always wanted to become a manga artist. I created manga as an amateur and sent it into magazines. Magazines would give a critique [of a submission] and if it was good enough, you got to debut. I sent in work right before I became an assistant to Suzue Miuchi, a shojo artist who is famous in Japan. Her most popular series, Glass Mask, is an ongoing series up to volume number 40. I was her assistant for two years and then I made my professional debut as a shojo artist.

PWCW: How did you find out about boys' love?

MT: When I was pretty young, I happened upon a book of that material.

PWCW: What book was it and what impact did it have on you?

MT: It was June. The old school magazine, half comics, half articles. I was around 14 years old. Back then there weren’t many boys' love titles in bookstores. I’d share June magazine with my friends. It was pretty stimulating. But my dad found out one time. It was kind of a shock to him. He laughed at me. [The magazine] was lying on top of my desk, and he looked through it and laughed. I don't know why he didn’t get mad at me.

PWCW: At what point in your career did you start creating boys' love material?

MT: It was 10 years into my professional career.

PWCW: What made you want to start drawing boys' love stories?

MT: Basically, I was doing one serialized shojo title for a long time. At the end of it, a different publisher came to me and asked if I wanted to do a boys' love story. I thought of it as a renewal, a fresh start in a new genre. I always like the genre so I gave it a shot. Thanks to that, it became more fun to do the shojo title, too. It provided some balance.

PWCW: Are there specific boys' love manga-ka who had an influence on your work? I'm curious to know whether you read the work of artists like Moto Hagio or if you read Song of the Wind in the Trees.

MT: I wasn't very influenced by June titles--they were more European. The main characters were usually royalty. My characters have more of a shojo flavor to them. Basically, it's like a shojo title but the guys who are supposed to be with the heroine are getting together on their own.

PWCW: What is the difference in creating boys' love narratives and shojo narratives? The similarities?

MT: For the similarities, they both involve romantic stories and the characters are troubled by the romantic relationships they are in. The difference is that in shojo titles the main character is a girl, so I try to make from a girl's point of view. Emotions are key to the narrative. For boys' love, I try to make it action based, more from the guy's point of view.

PWCW: Has working in boys' love hurt your reputation at all with either publishers or readers? How do publishers react when they hear about your boys' love work?

MT: The publisher never said anything. I'm a free artist. I'm not contracted or obligated to them. I'm writing for the other publisher. Some of the fans, the girls, can't get into boys' love. There have been some complaints on the Internet that they can't get into that. But nobody has openly bashed me, nothing that negative. Fans have left because of the boys' love, but more fans got to know my work through my boys' love titles, and then started reading my shojo.

PWCW: Since boys' love is a niche market, does your shojo work ever act as a means to pursue your boys' love work?

MT: It doesn’t really act as financial support. I have two different fan bases for shojo titles and boys' love titles--they exist in harmony. One group isn’t bigger than the other. It's probably about the same. Especially now that there are so many boys' love fans in the States. But they only know about Yellow, since that's all that’s been released so far. They don't know about my shojo titles.

PWCW: Do you think that boys' love has gotten more popular since you started?

MT: It was already pretty big when I started [in 2000]. But it keeps growing, expanding. Boys' love fans are just fans of the entire genre, not a specific artist or style. They love everything about it. That's why it keeps growing.

PWCW: In the boys' love genre, the roles of seme [aggressor] and uke [younger, bottom-role player] predominate most stories. But in Yellow, your protagonists, Goh and Taki, are equals. What made you want to create a series where the main characters are free of those roles?

MT: Actually, I had been reading a lot of boys' love and seeing a lot of seme and uke things going on. I like the pairing of Starsky and Hutch--the officer type of story. I wanted to write something like that, something different. And I wanted to make it more difficult for them to get together by making one character gay and one straight.

PWCW: Yellow is a very sexy series yet without graphically depicting the act. Is there a reason why you wanted to keep Yellow relatively safe?

MT: I didn't intentionally make it less graphic than others. But there were a few reasons it came out that way. It was one of the first boys' love titles I was working on and also, there’s too much going on in the rest of story to sit them down and do a sex scene. Maybe if there was a time when things settled down, then I could have done a sex scene. I have done something a bit more graphic in two other titles. One is Yokan and the other is Kashinfu (supposedly a type of wind)is this Tateno's comment? or editor's? what does "supposedly" mean here? it reads oddly if it's her comment. sjr. Hero Heel might be a little more graphic--but just a little bit.

PWCW: By the same measure, the sexual tension between Goh and Taki is both subtle and overpowering. Overpowering in that Goh's affection and desire for Taki is palpable, subtle in that their physical relationship escalates little by little with each chapter. How do you maintain that tension while building upon it?

MT: For that aspect of the tension, it all flowed naturally. I didn't have to think about it. I think it's because the characters' personalities are so distinct. They carried the story along for me.

PWCW: What's your schedule like? How many series can you work on at a time?

MT: Right now I’m working on six episodes. Four boys' love titles and two shojo titles. I piece my schedule together so that every three episodes, I get a certain amount of vacation after I submit my work. All the episodes are serialized in magazines. For each magazine, I get some vacation time after I submit my finished work. But I'm always working on something.

PWCW: Can you talk about the element of fantasy in shojo and boys' love manga? Oftentimes fantasy in both categories centers around one character who desperately wants to be with the other. What is the importance of this focused desire in shojo manga and boys' love?

MT: People can get into ordinary-life manga if it's relatable. If it has fantasy [or an element of] desire, that desire can really draw an audience into a fantasy story. Desire is a draw. Desire exists in boys' love not just as erotic desire, but showing that the characters want to be with the person that they love. It's stronger in a boys' love story than in a romantic shojo title. I think it's something that draws the audience in.

PWCW: Was there ever a time when being a manga-ka wasn't all it was cracked up to be? Where you thought you might pursue something else?

MT: Yes, I've thought that before. It's different from what I imagined. I can't write what I want all the time. I have rewrite after rewrite after rewrite if the publisher doesn't like what I submitted. The job is a lot tougher than I imagined.

PWCW: Do you have words of advice for aspiring cartoonists in this country?

MT: Draw a lot. My advice is that even if you're not that good, even if you're copying the artwork of others, just keep going. Eventually you'll find your own style.