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In recent years Japanese manga (comics) have exploded onto the North American comics market, rapidly taking over the graphic novel sections of book and comic stores and generating fans among adolescent audiences.' Most comics being translated and published in the United States are aimed at this age group and along clear gender lines. Shorten comics are considered to be primarily for boys and tend to focus on action and adventure narratives, while shojo comics for girls typically present more romantically oriented stories. More than a passing fad, manga have become a firmly established segment of the U.S. publishing industry, and in 2004 total manga sales for the United States and Canada were up to $207 million (Memmott 2005, 4d). The manga industry in Japan is even larger, with "gross revenues totaling 531 billion yen ($5 billion)" in 2001 (Thorn 2004,169).
Japanese manga are flourishing in North America, but the majority of texts translated and sold are heterosexually oriented despite the fact that there is a wide array of more sexually transgressive manga being published in Japan. Therefore, when Tokyopop, a U.S. publisher of Japanese manga, released several new queer series in the fall of 2003 they took a brave leap in introducing what I will be referring to as "boy-love manga" to the U.S. comics market. As the name suggests, boy-love manga present romantic narratives that visually depict homoerotic love between male protagonists. By and large, these comics are created by and for women. They have a well-established history in Japan and have generated a huge following of female readers, particularly teenage girls. It is their recent emergence on the North American manga market that raises several interesting questions. In particular, how does the transnational circulation of these comics require us to consider their popularity in new ways? And how do boy-love manga, by virtue of their queer content, work subversively within a more global context?
To clarify my terms, in this paper I will be using boy-love manga as a larger all-encompassing genre term, while distinguishing between the two separate categories of shonen-ai and yaoi that fall under it.2 Shonen-ai manga tend to emphasize elaborate romances that contain imagery more suggestive than sexually explicit. A palpable thread of erotic tension is, however, present and...