Christopher Butcher, manager of Toronto’s The Beguiling, gives Eye Weekly a crash course in porn comics (not entirely safe for work):
EYE: Has the wide availability of internet pornography affected your sales? These days, the demand for smutty stuff, especially fetish material, is generally sated by the internet. Our sales are still high, but they’re not what they used to be. People keep their kinks to themselves. Most of the customers we get for smut aren’t part of the computer generation — they don’t know how to get what they want on the internet.
Instead, to take their place, there’s this whole new wave of smut comics, called Yaoi. Yaoi are Japanese manga about male-male relationships, but they’re written and drawn by women, for women. They’re the number one growth category for manga here in North America, and women here and even some gay men have really been jumping on board. You get everything from really sweet slice-of-life stuff to more risque material.
He also covers censorship, shelving, and narrative versus sex in yaoi.
May 27th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
I really wish there were more western porn comics available. I’m not into hentai, as it just looks weird, but western style porn comics are great. I only have a small collection, and I love it. It’s hilarious.