The Eroicaverse: El Halcon

This is the fourth in a series of articles discussing From Eroica With Love and its spinoffs. For the index, go here.

Continuing on with the theme of pirate manga, the next From Eroica With Love spinoff chronologically is El Halcon – The Hawk. It ran in Seventeen magazine from October 1977-February 1978, and once again focuses on Tyrian Persimmon and his naval exploits in the late 16th century. It is a prequel to Seven Seas, Seven Skies, and it attempts to make a more sympathetic character of the cold and calculating character in the earlier work. Flashbacks to an unhappy childhood are interspersed through a story that begins with his first officer assignment and continues as Tyrian gains more power through the English Navy, hoping to one day defect to Spain. Does it succeed in making him a sympathetic character? It’s hard to like Tyrian, but his life story is dramatic, swashbuckling, and lavishly illustrated, so it makes for a great read.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Eroicaverse: Happy Holidays

This is my week for an Eroica post, but unfortunately the further adventures of The Man in Purple will have to wait, as I have no scanner nor access to my volumes of El Halcon. Instead, please enjoy some seasonal scarf yanking. Well, mostly scarves.

Read the rest of this entry »

Eroicaverse 3: Seven Seas, Seven Skies

This is the third in a series of articles discussing From Eroica With Love and its spinoffs. For the index, go here.

You know, there aren’t enough pirate manga out there. There’s One Piece, of course, and one might argue that it’s so good that we don’t need other pirate manga. But when you combine pirates with From Eroica With Love, how can the results be anything less than fabulous?

The link to From Eroica With Love is once again very concrete, though I suspect that’s only because Aoike was cross-promoting the series and gave the Eroica characters a reason to discuss Seven Seas, Seven Skies. The main characters are the “ancestors” of Dorian and Klaus, and are drawn to look exactly like them (moreso than usual). “The Man in Purple,” a contentious painting in From Eroica With Love, is a portrait of Tyrian Persimmon, the character in this series. The characters seem to share some traits in common with Dorian and Klaus, too, and the series shares a kind of romantic heroism that From Eroica With Love possesses. But it’s not really a prequel, simply related.

Read the rest of this entry »

Eroicaverse 2: Sons of Eve

This is the first in a series of articles talking about From Eroica With Love and related series. For the index, go here.

Continuing my look at the work of Yasuko Aoike, specifically the numerous series she’s done related to From Eroica With Love, this series is actually what should be the first stop. Allman Stories is a precursor to this, but Sons of Eve is, for all intents and purposes, the beginning of Aoike’s modern body of work. In fact, aside from the recent 5-volume Yasuko Aoike Collection reprints, it seems like her work prior to Sons of Eve doesn’t exist, and is omitted from most bibliographies.

Sons of Eve ran from March 1976-August 1979 in Princess magazine. It ran concurrently with From Eroica With Love until approximately the “Dramatic Spring” storyline of that series, though Eroica was running in the quarterly Viva Princess until Sons of Eve finished. Sons of Eve came first, and was definitely an early precursor to Eroica. The zaniness in the first volume of Eroica is a toned-down version of Sons of Eve, complete with a cameo from the three main characters in the first chapter.

And when I say “toned down zaniness,” I mean… really, really toned down. As silly as that first volume of Eroica is, it’s nothing compared to the insanity in Sons of Eve.

Read the rest of this entry »

Eroicaverse 1: Allman Stories

This is the first in a series of articles talking about From Eroica With Love and related series. For the index, go here.

First in my version of the Eroicaverse is Allman Stories, a volume of short stories released circa 1976. It’s only tangentially related to Eroica, in that some of the stories serve as a good lead-in to Sons of Eve, which is a prequel of sorts to Eroica. They aren’t really related, at least not as far as I can see, but they are the same type of story. That’s a bad reason to group an author’s stories together (she also writes shoujo, so maybe I should just talk about them all?), but they are very similar silly shounen ai comedies, and that’s a good enough reason for me.

As I was reading this to write it up for the Eroicaverse article, I realized it would be a good backwards look at the way her art evolved from the mid-70s to her debut in the mid-60s. So I’m going to talk about that in more detail than I did last time.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Eroicaverse

Odds are, if you’ve read any article written by me since about 2007, you know that I have a deep love for the series From Eroica With Love, by Yasuko Aoike. As one of my new Friday Features, I’m going to take a look at all the various related series that Aoike wrote (hint: there are a lot). But I want to have an anchor post for these, and I also want to put off talking about Sons of Eve as long as possible. So instead of jumping right in, I’m going to talk a little bit about Yasuko Aoike here, plus link all the Eroica spin-off articles I’m going to be talking about eventually.

From Eroica With Love Spinoffs:

- Allman Stories
- Sons of Eve
- Seven Seas, Seven Skies
- El Halcon

Bonus:
Happy Holidays

Some more info, and pretty pictures (one NSFW), after the cut.

Read the rest of this entry »