A few weeks ago I mentioned that Girl Friends volume 2 is on sale. Not too long afterwards I learned that it hit #5 on The New York Times manga best seller list! Congrats to Milk Morinaga and to the rest of the team at Seven Seas.
Seven Seas will be releasing another Milk Morinaga title in the summer called ‘Kisses, Sighs, & Cherry Blossom Pink.’ I’m working on the script re-write right now and, just like with Girl Friends, it’s a very sweet series featuring high school girls in love. I’ve been listening to Tegan and Sara’s newest album while I work (it’s being streamed online at the CBC Music website until Jan.28th) and it’s kind of perfect music for listening to when you’re working on a shojo-ai manga. ‘Heartthrob’ is much more of a pop album from Teagan and Sara rather than an acoustic indie album, but all the synth and production makes it seem like J-pop’s distant Canadian cousin. Considering the album’s title it’s no surprise that pretty much every song is a love song in one way or another. It sounds not only like the kind of thing that Nana and Hitomi (the main characters of K,S, & CBP) might listen to, but the lyrics sound like thoughts they might have (I especially like the chorus from ‘I’m Not Your Hero:’ ‘I’m not your hero/but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t brave/ I never walked the party line/ But that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t afraid’) .
It’s also a good fit for a reason that is both superficial but important. Teagan and Sara are both gay. Their songs are not explicitly about being in love with a girl or being in love with a guy- they pretty much only use the pronoun ‘you’ in their songs, which aside from adding ambiguity also makes their music that much more intimate. I’m not gay, and I’m pretty sure Milk Morinaga isn’t either (just going by her author notes at the end of Girl Friends), but in a world full of hetero-normative works she’s created several touching manga with down-to-Earth, realistic characters (relatively at least. Even with it’s slight layer of fantasy it’s still more realistic than %99.99 of yaoi manga). Teagan and Sara’s music likewise offers something different from most popular media, coming from a different and less represented point of view. So maybe that’s why it works as such a good soundtrack for Kisses, Sighs, & Cherry Blossom Pink (but mostly, I think it’s ’cause of the pop-y, synthy love songs).