Manga A Day: Gerard & Jacques Vol 2

Amazon.com: Gerard & Jacques Volume 2: (Yaoi): Books: Fumi Yoshinaga ISBN: 1598165429 ISBN-13: 9781598165425

There was no manga post yesterday. Bad day at the day job totally wiped me out, so I took a nap. When I woke up I planned to review Gerard & Jaques Vol 1. But I got halfway through my copy when I discovered that I had a defective volume! About halfway through it would go three pages of chapter 4, then a couple of chapter 6, and then some of chapter 5, and then back to 4. -_- On other words, Friday sucked all around. So I decided to skip my Manga A Day post and go back to bed. But I had read a copy of Gerard & Jacques Vol 1 about a year ago, so I decided to go ahead and read and review Vol 2 today.

Gerard & Jacques is a yaoi love story set against the backdrop of the French  Revolution, which only becomes important in this second book. In the first book Gerard, a commoner but a wealthy one, visits a brothel that specializes in young men. The owner asks him to be the first customer to a young aristocrat boy. Jacques had been sold by his family to cover his father's gambling debts after his death. Gerard, after er...breaking him in... pays to redeem him and tells Jacques to make something of himself. Some time later Jacques ended up working as a houseboy for Gerard.

At the start of the second book Jacques has graduated to manservant and is in his twenties. Jacques' mother, her fortunes having improved after remarrying, tracks him down. She and her new husband want to adopt him into their family. Jacques must decide if he wants to live a life of ease as an aristocrat or stay as a servant of Gerard. Their relationship is mostly platonic at this point, despite the way they met and some inappropriate touching in vol 1.

Gerard is shocked when Jacques returns. He found a dirty secret about his childhood and is crushed. Gerard, who'd been getting stinking drunk at the thought of him leaving, declares that he'll love him more than any stupid mother or father could. He starts to prove it, but they are interrupted.

The next day Gerard doesn't remember much of it, other that Jacques is staying. Jacques can't forget and begins to fantasize every night about Gerard. The slightest contact causes him to blush and explode. (Literally! As in "Kaboom!") At last he can't take it anymore and crawls into bed with Gerard.

Things take a dramatic turn here, with the reintroduction of Raul De Amalric who had been part of a threesome relationship with Gerard and his wife in the past. He had betrayed Gerard with his wife, and continues to visit mischief on him. (Surprise! Sex!) Also, the French Revolution happens.

The artwork is great, as usual for Yoshinaga. I especially like the detail she put in the period costumes. She has her usual fondness for detailed characters floating against white space, but she does some beautiful establishing shots of period French Architecture and interior design when necessary. She's got a bad habit of posing her characters in painful looking embraces in this book. There are a lot of instances of exposition "bombs" in this story too. In the space of a page five years or more will pass. Jacques or Gerard will explain, in a huge bubble that takes up half a page, how much time has passed and what they've all been doing since then.

It throws off the pacing, and compared to the first book, feels very rushed. It makes me wonder if this was planned as a longer story and then chopped up to fit in a two book series. Despite that, I'd still recommend this two book series because it's a head above most other yaoi.