May 26, 2009

Lesbian comics by men?

I recently listed Girlfiend Comics in the Lesbian Romance section on the comics wiki Comixpedia. The section carries this startling heading:

Female homosexual romances- also called Yuri or Shoujo-Ai. These webcomics tend to feature angst, but also generally happy endings. Perhaps regrettably, many are written by men, and of those, quite a few make use of the prurient possibilities of the genre.

I did a little research, and the wiki is spot-on! Many lesbian webcomics and yuri manga--especially the dirtier ones--are written by men. I guess I never noticed it before because I can't usually tell the gender of a Japanese name. But that explains a lot, actually. When I first started posting comics online, I would get the occasional email asking if I was a man. Not often, but more than once. (This was before I had my name and glamour pics splashed all over the site.) I always wondered why anyone would think my comic about lesbians was written by a man. Now I know. It's because they're "prurient"!

2 comments:

Zaygne Torkmar said...

prurient, eh?

Well that's a 3 dollar word. Brings me back to my days in Latin class, it does. (Incidentally this is one of the few times when knowing Latin does come in handy).

Michelle Gruben said...

Yeah, I took Latin back in school, too, and it is pretty useless most of the time. I had a Latin teacher who insisted it was living language and made us speak only in Latin in the classroom. Which is great when you need to tell your friend something like, "The queen was in the villa, and she frightened the wretched slave."

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