Now That’s an Interesting Coincidence…

In the space of a week I’ve read two comics that have featured surprise same-sex hook-ups.  The first one happened in the pages of John Layman and Rob Guillory’s “Chew vol. 2” while the second appeared in vol. 2 of Masayuki Ishikawa’s “Moyasimon.”  Both were quite surprising to read, though it was more surprising to observe that the Americans produced a more interesting scene.

(Minor spoilers for a specific scene in both series follow…)

In “Chew,” FDA agent Tony Chu’s professional life has been made a living hell by his superior, Applebee who hates him for reasons that aren’t really that clear.  It’s the series’ biggest issue in my opinion and vol. 2 continues along those same lines when Chu’s ex-partner from his police days, John Colby, becomes his current partner, cyborg face and all.  They’re both good friends as well as partners, so when Applebee goes on the warpath looking for Chu after he takes off to investigate Chu begs Colby to find some way to get him off of his back.

The final scene of the issue is a full-page shot of Colby sleeping in bed while Applebee stares at the ceiling.

It took me a few seconds to realize exactly what I was looking at here, but when it finally hit me, I couldn’t help but laugh.  I mean, I was expecting Colby to resort to something like knocking Applebee out and putting him in a closet but that would just be too mundane for this series.  While Layman has shown that he can pull of strange concepts with the greatest of ease in this series, such as the worldwide ban on poultry, and even get good stories out of them, this is probably the most character-driven moment of the series.  What’s even more interesting is that Layman even set it up in a counter-intuitive fashion earlier in the volume when Colby makes an offhand remark that Applebee’s anger comes from his repressed homosexual urges.  Chu’s interaction with Applebee near the end of the volume would tend to bear out this idea, but there are a lot of other questions begging to be answered and situations to be explored.  If nothing else, it makes me hope that Layman continues to find unorthodox situations to conventional problems in this series.

As for the scene in “Moyasimon,” it involves college freshman Hazuki Oikawa waking up naked in a futon with upperclassman Aoi Muto after the two got completely sloshed while they went out to eat with Professor Itsuki the previous night.  Now there’s a chance that Ishikawa could write off this situation as a hilarious misunderstanding, but that would be taking the easy and far less interesting way out.  To be perfectly honest, I’m hoping that he does develop the relationship between the two because it would make a refreshing change from all the gay relationships that we see in localized manga both serious (see Fumi Yoshinaga’s “Antique Bakery” and “Ooku”) and fanservicy (see all of her titles that Digital Manga has released that aren’t “Antique Bakery”).  It’d also make a good fit for the series’ underlying theme of broadening one’s horizons, as it shows you one more way people can change and grow when they get to college.

At any rate, it wouldn’t surprise me terribly if we found out that Oikawa just passed out before anything happened in the next volume.  Though the series has been fun, it hasn’t really been all that deep since Ishikawa has yet to show that he has a story that he wants to tell with the characters he’s created.  These two volumes have given me the distinct impression that he sees the series as more of a vehicle to talk about the things that interest him, such as germs, fermentation, what makes good sake, crazy college clubs.  That’s not a bad thing, but as these things have mostly been exploited to comedic rather than dramatic effect I’m betting that Oikawa’s heterosexuality will emerge from this encounter bruised but unchanged.  It’s a shame because as “Chew” shows us, such a scene can be played for more than a cheap laugh.