First Love

One of my favorite things to do is mocking common tropes in shoujo manga. The image on the left, for example, is a comic I did about a year and a half ago making fun of the phrase "only look at me", which I've come across in a surprising number of books). Now I'm a big fan of shoujo, and I admit to getting teary-eyed and moved by a lot of titles in the genre, but I'm secure enough in my love of it to realize that shoujo can be pretty ridiculous at times. But then again, that may be why I love it so much. No surprise that I'm a fan of romantic comedies, I guess.

はつコイ(Hatsukoi or First Love) is a short story along those lines. It was the second (and unfortunately last) comic I got to make for the manga club I joined at Doshisha University, so it was originally written in Japanese and is read right to left. I made it fairly quickly, in about a week, because I only had a week before I left to go back home. Nonetheless, I think it served its purpose and I'm quite happy with it, even if it isn't a technical masterpiece (there are some places I'm itching to redraw but alas, that's what you get when you do things quickly). At the end of the day, the most important fact was that it was fun!

So I've translated the story here so you can read it (it's also on my site). Enjoy!

One funny side story about this comic--when I finished writing it, I gave it to one of my Japanese friends to read it in order to check the Japanese. Halfway through she suddenly started giggling, and said, "Suddenly you switched (from standard Japanese) to kansai-ben!". Kansai-ben is the local dialect of the Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe area where I was living (I was taught with standard Japanese but living in Kyoto it was hard not to pick up that way of speaking). I didn't even know I had done it, funnily enough!