YEN PRESS
[This review was originally posted on Patreon.]
STORY: Various
ART: Various
TRANSLATION: Eleanor Summers
LETTERS: Alexis Eckerman
MISC. ART: U35; Yutaka Hiiragi; Non
COVER: Fly
ISBN: 978-1-9753-5909-6; paperback (May 2020); Rated “M” for “Mature”
276pp, B&W, $13.00 U.S., $17.00 CAN
Éclair (stylized as “éclair”) is a series of girls' love or “yuri” (lesbian) manga produced by Japanese publisher, ASCII Media Works (a brand company of Kadokawa Future Publishing). Yen Press published an English-language edition of the first Éclair collection in June 2018. The publisher will also release three more Éclair collections in 2020, including the recently published Éclair Blanche (stylized as éclair blanche).
Éclair Blanche: A Girls' Love Anthology that Resonates in Your Heart contains 15 girls' love short stories and vignettes. The girls' love anthology, Éclair, returns with new stories from popular girl's love authors. This new volume features works from favorite girls' love mangaka such as Canno (“The Unemployed Woman and the High School Girl”), Mushu (“Happy Yellow Chick”), and Fly (“Flowers in a Storm”), who also provides the cover art. This new addition to the Éclair lineup will sweep lovers of girls' love off their feet!
[This volumes contains an authors' “Postscript.”]
The Éclair Blanche manga is one of the few girls' love manga that I have read. I am pretty sure that Éclair Blanche is the first girls' love anthology that I have read, because I certainly didn't read the original collection, Éclair. [On the other hand, I have read quite a few boys' love anthologies over the last two decades.]
The Éclair Blanche: A Girls' Love Anthology that Resonates in Your Heart Graphic Novel has some powerful stories and some poor stories. Many of the stories here are more like vignettes than they are like a full-fledged manga short stories. Fly's “Flowers in a Storm” is a strong open with its tale of Eri, a high school student who is about to lose the young woman she loves to a faraway college. The volume ends with a misfire, Auri Hirao's magical girl offering, “Secret Sharing.”
“Something Only I Know” by Kagegichi Tadano offers the volume's only love triangle, and the story proves to be a bit edgy. “The Unemployed Woman and the High School Girl” by Canno is the tale of 28-year-old Mao, who wants to be a kept woman, and Hazumi, the 16-year-old rich girl who wants to use her money to take care of Mao. Some readers will no doubt be put off not so much by the age difference between these characters, but by the fact that Hazumi cannot legally consent to have a sexual relationship with the adult Mao, at least in many states in the U.S. I think that Canno gets around the legalities by having the characters tell each other that they are willing to wait one another out.
I won't call Éclair Blanche a great collection, but it contains enough quality girls' love comics to make it worthy of a girls' love fan's attention. There is also some strong illustrators in this volume, with diverse styles and approaches to graphic storytelling. That is another reason to get Éclair Blanche.
7 out of 10
Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"
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