31 Days Of CCS, #10: Ana Two

Full disclosure: Fieldmouse Press will be publishing Ana Two's horror comic Dark Room next year. A running joke I have with Ana is that, regardless of the subject of their comics, they are always inevitably about power exchange and power relationships in kink-oriented relationships. Even their delightfully deranged comic for Diskette Press, Girl Yaoi, starts with a ridiculous premise but then inevitably gets down to the same kind of exploration Ana Two has done in their other comics. This isn't a criticism but rather an amused observation; the artist just can't help themself!

Girl Yaoi is unhinged from the very first page, and while I am not the target audience for its subject (women who read boys love comics, aka fujoshi), Ana Two deftly and hilariously gives all the context for the story that a reader might need. Aster Zhou is a yaoi enthusiast with a magic ring that allows her to enter the stories she reads in her dreams and allows her to fuck to her heart's content. This is quickly complicated when her new next-door neighbor, Summer Li, gets ahold of Aster's favorite yaoi and magic ring. This leads to them fucking each other, in boy form, in a series of shared dreams. 

There's backstory that includes Aster's teenage crush on Summer and feeling betrayed when Summer read Aster's highly sexual journal. They become neighbors thanks to the whims of fate, but Aster doesn't reveal her true feelings because getting to experience a different yaoi every night is too much of a draw for her to turn down. This is the best part of the whole book--Ana Two's warped genius in crafting so many different yaoi stories is hilarious and yet completely true to the genre. There's a frantic quality to their storytelling, with big, thick, angular lines and crazy angles for the panels. Sometimes, this leads to confusion while reading, as the order of the panels is not always clearly laid out, and this is a distraction. For the most part, the context clues usually sort out such problems, and Ana Two's use of spot color (yellow for Aster, pink for Summer) cleverly allows the reader to quickly identify the identity of each woman in the many, many sex scenes in the book. 

That speaks to the excellent production values from the new stewards of Diskette Press, Dylan Box and Robin Rowe. Their offerings have uniformly been a huge step above the previous iteration of the press, and Girl Yaoi is one of their greatest triumphs in that regard. Ana Two's writing is so sharp, especially in the way the reader comes to be deeply sympathetic toward both characters, even as issues of desire, consent, betrayal, and kink all come to the fore. This isn't a story about kink or power exchange as much as it is two vulnerable, sensitive people who eventually find a way to let the other in.