The Clan of the Nakagamis

Tokio Nakagami is 25, but has the body and face of a 14-year-old boy despite being a math teacher. Haruku Iijima, Tokio's secret boyfriend, has the body of a tall, dashing young man though he's only a high school student. The potential creepiness of this teacher-student relationship is mitigated somewhat by the fact that it's the math teacher who acts and looks like a kid, and the mature-looking student who's always trying to cop a feel, but the fetishization of the cute and starry-eyed is on full display in artist Ken's clean-lined drawings of young men in love. Each episode of Clan of the Nakagamis revolves around the frustrated couple's attempts for closeness of a more physical kind. Running interference is Tokio's mysteriously overprotective family, the titular Nakagami clan, which includes a mother who looks like a Japanese doll, a voluptuous hottie who turns out to be Tokio's brother and a hard-drinking grandfather who emerges from his coffin looking like a waifish Little Lord Fauntleroy. The episodes rarely go beyond easy gags, but Ken has a talent for depicting the kind of doe-eyed beauty that's perfect for boy's love (yaoi ) manga, managing to keep the characters attractive and sympathetic, even as silliness prevails. (July)