Review: MISTER MISTRESS

 I can't not close out this month by shooting the metaphorical fish in the barrel - i.e., reaching deep into my boxes of BL manga and finding some silly-looking stinker to review.

MISTER MISTRESS (Aijin Incubus), by Rize Shinba.  First published in 2005 and first published in North America in 2008.

PLOT:

Fujimaru is your standard horny hetero teen boy, and it turns out that his teenage libido is the key to unlocking the secret of his late grandfather's house: an incubus named Rei.  Rei craves Fujimaru's body and the raging hormones within it, but Fujimaru isn't very keen on the idea.  The more he tries to resist, the harder Rei tries to trick him into sex.  How long can Fujimari hold out against such temptation?

STORY:

It's a little strange that for all the BL can that be found out there in English, there aren't a great deal of stories about incubi.  It seems like a obvious set-up for sexy hijinks, but it seems that BL fans tend to favor more down-to-earth concepts instead of literal sex demons.  I just hope that most of them aren't like Mister Mistress, which mostly just sucks and is kind of creepy.

If you're like me and are not terribly keen on seeing lots of sexual assault in your BL manga, then this manga is going to have you giving it a constant, suspicious side-eye.  Rei never flat-out assaults Fujimaru, but he does employ every bit of guile and trickery available to him to manipulate Fujimari into having sex.  He even goes so far as to pose as his school counselor so that Fujimaru cannot escape from his attentions.  It's consistent behavior for a demon, but it's far from an improvement.  At least Rei brings a sense of humor to his work.  It's infrequent, but there are some welcome moments of levity in what is otherwise a fairly standard BL melodrama. 

As for Fujimaru, he's your typical (and frankly rather dull) uke.  He makes a big fuss about having to have sex with Rei, but he endures it for the sake of protecting his plot device innocent baby brother.  It's all nothing more than an excuse for Fujimaru to keep making half-hearted protestations about his orientation until the final chapters.  In the end, this just another boring bubble-era BL with a bit of demon-themed dressing.

ART:

Shinba's art is no more inspired than her writing.  The characters are boring but competently drawn (well...aside from their spidery hands).  We certainly get a good look at the leads from just about every angle, as they like to drag out the sex scenes for pages upon pages at a time.  There's also a lot of tentacle action here, be they made out of soap bubbles or your standard clothes dissolving, basically a penis in everything but name variety.  The big problem is their page composition, as they tend to just wedge panels in all over and the end result is very messy-looking.

RATING:

Definitely give Mister Mistress a miss.  It's a low-effort book at every level that squanders its premise and wastes the time of anyone who reads it.

This series was published by Aurora Press.  This series is complete in two volumes.  Both volumes were published; the physical volumes are out of print, but both are available digitally via SuBLime.