{"id":1333,"date":"2009-11-18T00:01:51","date_gmt":"2009-11-18T08:01:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mangavillage.co.uk\/?p=1333"},"modified":"2009-11-18T00:01:51","modified_gmt":"2009-11-18T08:01:51","slug":"antique-bakery-volume-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/2009\/11\/18\/antique-bakery-volume-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Antique Bakery Volume 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Description:<\/strong> When an old antique shop re-opens as the hottest new bakery in an unsuspecting neighborhood, there\u2019s no doubt that a few surprises are cooking. Love, rejection, old high school flames and the most delicious boy-to-boy affections all blend together to make a treat unlike any other. The Antique Bakery is now open\u2026care for a dessert? <\/em> Antique Bakery teases the palate with humor, fun flirtation and a host of sweet and sour moments. No matter what you crave, this is one shop you can\u2019t pass up.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>By: <\/strong>Fumi Yoshinaga
\nPublisher:<\/strong> Digital Manga Publishing
\nAge Rating:<\/strong> 16+
\nGenre:<\/strong> Comedy
\nPrice:<\/strong> $12.95<\/p>\n

As I said last week, for the month of November I\u2019m going to review cooking manga. When I reviewed the first volume of Kitchen Princess<\/em>, I said this about cooking manga: In my mind, cooking manga demonstrates everything that comics can be\u2014all about great stories about something everyone does. I mean, let\u2019s face it; everybody eats. Cooking manga is shonen, shojo, seinen, yaoi\u2014it cuts across genres in ways that other types of stories don\u2019t. I just think it\u2019s cool how creators play with food and cooking to come up with so many different situations, characters, plots. Plus, there\u2019s some inherent difficulties in representing food in comics\u2014the visual pleasures of food are not easily re-created in black and white line drawings, and the obvious draws\u2014smell and taste\u2014are not available to the mangaka. Yet the best cooking manga makes you hungry!<\/em> I\u2019ve heard about Antique Bakery<\/em> quite a bit\u2014Fuji Yoshinaga is a major talent and it shows here. She\u2019s primarily a yaoi artist, and her work is spoken of in the same way that I\u2019ve heard people speak about DeathNote<\/em>, Monster<\/em>, and Nana\u2014<\/em>as in, \u201cif you want to know what seinen\/shonen\/shoujo\/yaoi manga is like,\u201d <\/em>someone will say, (or even, \u201cbefore you judge that genre\u201d) \u201ccheck out this.\u201d Antique Bakery<\/em> <\/em>is the yaoi that sealed Yoshinaga\u2019s reputation here in the US, and so when I decided to write a month of cooking manga reviews, I knew I had to include this title.<\/p>\n

<\/em>I\u2019m glad I did\u2014Antique Bakery<\/em> i<\/em>s as sweet, delectable, and playful as the pastries sold in the titular shop. This is a love triangle, kind of, but at heart it\u2019s a situation comedy. In fact, it feels only nominally yaoi. The setup is this: Tachibana owns the bakery and runs service, Ono is the master pastry chef, and Eiji is the equivalent of a busboy. And the setup is this: Tachibana is an oddball business-type, kind of a schemer, beautiful but loutish, a straight guy who\u2019s hoping that his bakery will give him access to cute young women he can endlessly hit on. And while Ono is the finest pastry chef there is, he is, in his own words, \u201ca gay of demonic charm\u201d\u2014every bakery and restaurant he\u2019s ever worked in has fired him for causing fights between men, husbands leaving their wives, and worse. Eiji is a boxer with a vicious sweet tooth and detached retinas. Thus, Tachibana\u2019s too much of a businessman to hire any chef but the best, but Ono\u2019s total, inescapable fear of women means that Tachibana cannot hire a \u201csweet little counter girl.\u201d And Ono\u2019s omnivorous sexual attraction has found in Tachibana the one man who escapes his devilish charms. Eiji, on the other hand, works just to be near the master chef\u2014a desire of another sort. But he\u2019s not Ono\u2019s type, and he has no respect for Tachibana. And that is what I mean by love triangle, albeit, a love triangle of a different sort.<\/p>\n

This first volume begins in the present, with the bakery and its trio acting as set pieces for \u201cproblem of the week\u201d storylines. Complex set-ups, involving interweaving both the main and secondary guest characters\u2019 backstories leads to a not very satisfying ending for the chapters, but good enough. At this point, midway through the volume, you have a fun handle on the characters and the humor. Then the story drops back to the beginning and the series of events that led to the creation of the Antique Bakery<\/em>. And it\u2019s here that the story, humor, characters, art\u2014everything really clicks and starts humming along.<\/p>\n

I loved Antique Bakery<\/em>. Just picking up the book to look over sections for this review had me cracking up seeing again some of the great moments. Yoshinaga has such great control over her characters, their gestures, and facial expressions. Her stylings are solidly in the yaoi mode, with lithe, limber guys, finely rendered and lovingly detailed. One of the things that tends to bother me about yaoi\u2014how backgrounds tend to completely vanish for pages\u2014here is done judiciously. And if you\u2019re squeamish about guy\/guy action, there\u2019s only really one brief scene in the book, definitely more heat that fire. That said, the guys are sexy, particularly Ono when he gets dressed up to go out on the town. What I don\u2019t know is where the series goes from here. The whole set-up seems like a delicate balance that threatens to fall apart if Yoshinaga keeps things going as they are, or collapse in on itself because the stories stall out in a stale, guest with romantic problem per chapter.<\/p>\n

A couple of other comments before I leave Antique Bakery<\/em>: Yoshinaga does a fantastic job of the cooking side of the manga. There aren\u2019t lots of drawings of the pastries, but what make\u2019s it really sing are the ways she has the customers savor their food. When somebody tastes great food in cooking manga they can immediately break down the ingredients that make it so. In a good cooking manga, nearly every character is, at heart, a foodie, sort of like how everyone in a shoujo manga is pretty. In Antique Bakery<\/em>, this food ecstasy becomes a more general expression of sensual, sexual energy. So that everyone\u2019s sweet tooth becomes suggestive of different cravings entirely. It\u2019s very clever.<\/p>\n

Finally, I just want to note something about the packaging of this by Digital Manga Press. Their volumes are larger than the typical manga released in the US, and they include the dust jackets that most other publishers forego. I really enjoyed these elements of the book. Yoshinaga\u2019s art felt expansive and dramatic with the extra space, and the slipcover gave Antique Bakery that extra bit of class that made it stand out. DMP really stands out with this volume.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Description: When an old antique shop re-opens as the hottest new bakery in an unsuspecting neighborhood, there\u2019s no doubt that a few surprises are cooking. Love, rejection, old high school flames and the most delicious boy-to-boy affections all blend together to make a treat unlike any other. The Antique Bakery is now open\u2026care for a dessert? Antique Bakery teases the palate with humor, fun flirtation and a host of sweet and sour moments. No matter what you crave, this is one shop you can\u2019t pass up. By: Fumi Yoshinaga Publisher: Digital Manga Publishing Age Rating: 16+ Genre: Comedy Price: $12.95 As I said last week, for the month of November I\u2019m going to review cooking manga. When I reviewed the first volume of Kitchen Princess, I said this about cooking manga: In my mind, cooking manga demonstrates everything that comics can be\u2014all about great stories about something everyone does. I mean, let\u2019s face it; everybody eats. Cooking manga is shonen, shojo, seinen, yaoi\u2014it cuts across genres in ways that other types of stories don\u2019t. I just think it\u2019s cool how creators play with food and cooking to come up with so many different situations, characters, plots. Plus, there\u2019s some inherent…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":1375,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,14],"tags":[46,56,83,110,120],"class_list":["post-1333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-digital-manga-publishing","category-reviews","tag-dmp","tag-food","tag-manga","tag-review","tag-shojo"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2umma-lv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1333"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1333\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}