   |
Manga-ka: Rie Honjyo
Publisher: DMP/June
Rating: Mature (18+)
Released: November 2007
Synopsis: “Inori is a popular guy amongst the ladies in his university, but lately he keeps getting dumped. Cause unknown, Inori decides to drink away his troubles with his good friend Senou. With the beer flowing, Inori finds himself drawn to Senou. But when sobriety hits, will his feelings remain the same?”
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 themselves points out in the after word, so some readers may be momentarily tripped up by the identical appearances of unrelated people.
It’s a standard June release; a simple cover slip and no notable 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 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 an overall 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.
Written Feburary 3, 2008 by Lissa Pattillo for MangaJouhou
Book provided for review purposes by Digital Manga Publishing
Follow
