Two very different, very odd stories grace this little gem of the erotic. In the first, a beginning art student can't stop imagining the body of his first nude model at college, and she ends up initiating him into the joys of the female body. She stops, however, just short of intercourse, claiming that he should wait for a special girl who loves him to share that with. We then jump ahead many years to the young man in bed with, we assume, the "special girl," and thinking back to the encounter with the model. It's got that bildungsroman thing going for it, and the title of the story, "Shedding Youth," just underlines that point.
The next story veers vastly from the dramatic erotic and into the fantastic. A scientist lives with two genetically engineered beings, one female and one transsexual, though through flashbacks we are told that the regime for whom he works are unhappy that he's used their funding for this kind of experimentation. There is a fantastic sex scene between the three of them, very sexy and very loving, just before government agents bang on the door, drag the scientist away, and shoot one of the creatures.
As with Lust, the narrative plays a much larger role in these stories than just to hang some naughty drawings around. There's a point to the stories, a level upon which they're meant to touch a reader that's more than simply the carnal. Don't get me wrong - that's there for sure, but the endings, the switch of tenor that both present, takes away slightly from the eroticism, and leaves one with the understanding that sex is just a part of the lives of the characters we encounter, and not the be all and end all.
Of all the Mangerotica comics I own, I think I love this cover the most. I have a friend who once told me he wished he'd been raised Catholic so that the naughty nun trope would mean that much more to him. A valid point, I suppose, but I think this naughty nun is quite meaningful.
See you tomorrow.
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