MJ Review: Invisible Love

[Eric]

Title: Invisible Love
Mangaka: Rie Honjyo
Originally Serialized In: Various, (Hobunsha)
Genre: Yaoi, Drama, Romance
Licensed by: June (DMP)
Price: $12.95 (US)

Invisible Love is a collection of short stories following multiple couples coming about their inevitable hook-ups. That’s all there really is to say on the matter.

Almost all the stories in Invisible Love, eight in total, suffer from a lack of originality. Man sees man, man finds man attractive, and thus men sleep together. The first story feels the most thought-out, though against very little competition, as it showcases the nearly painless procedure of two school friends revealing their true feelings to one another. The other stories feel completely uninspired and thus aren’t very memorable. The only one that manages to stand out by the end doesn’t do so in a good way. Alien toy equals coma, equals vengeance, equals sex. It hardly manages to be half as entertaining as that short synopsis but at its expense, almost as funny.

Rie Honjyo has a nice art style that appears polished and professional. It’s a fairly simple style with emphasis put on eyes and hair and the artist uses screen tones well to balance out the artwork. There’s an issue with overused character designs and physical traits, which Rie Honjyo herself points out in the afterword, so some readers might be momentarily tripped up by the identical appearances of unrelated people.

It’s a standard June release: a simple cover slip and no noticeable errors with the translation, complete with several pages of advertising for some of the company’s other releases in the back. This release does suffer however from an unappealing cover design, with a blue coloured font that doesn’t at all compliment the brown pastels of the image and were haphazardly placed overtop it.

Unfortunately, Invisible Love is overall a dull and uneventful collection of stories that doesn’t manage to feel at all unique or capture any real emotion. The nice, but still not especially notable, artwork just isn’t enough of a saving grace to recommend this easily ignorable assortment of boys’ love.

Reviewer: Lissa Pattillo
Proofer: Eduardo Menendez
Editor: Eric Turner