Blank Slate manga
I don't usually read manga, but I did read both volumes of Blank Slate by Aya Kanno, because my wife Carla wrote the English adaptation. It's about a criminal named Zen who's lost his memory and doesn't know anything about his past identity. Zen hooks up with a bounty killer hired to bump him off and embarks on an adventure to find out who he really is and where he came from. I enjoyed it.
Aya Kanno draws her characters as stylish, androgynous David Bowie types. I think this look is called bishonen in Japan, and manga with these kinds of characters are popular with female readers in Japan. There's also an undercurrent of homoeroticism in Blank Slate -- I remember reading a Comics Journal article about a sub-genre of manga called yaoi, which, according to Wikipedia, is a "popular term for fictional media that focuses on homosexual male relationships yet is generally created by and for females."
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From the covers, and content, this does feel like it could be yaoi to a point. Are there any relatively obvious sexual connotations in some of the scenes between the two main male characters? If yes, then probably yaoi.
Not as much bishonen, for that's more "boy love." Not what the cover quite suggests.
Quick glossary:
"Bishonen" means "beautiful boy".
"Bishoujo" means "beautiful girl".
If a manga is described as "bishonen" or "bishoujo" it means it's about pretty boys or girls.
If it's described as "shonen" or "shoujo" it means it's for boys or girls.
"Shonen-ai" means "boy love" but apparently the term is "BL". "Yaoi" is thought of as more explicit.
Since it's a Shoujo Beat title I'm guessing it's more bishonen with undertones than anything.
To add to #2's comments
Shounen Ai mostly refers to works that are more romantic in nature, and often feature younger characters. Yaoi is, by a strict definition, hardcore pornography without any real story. Obviously, in real life, there isn't a hard line drawn between the two. BL/Boys Love is the general term for the entire genre, which is almost exclusively made, and read, by straight females. Serious fans of BL are refered to as Fujoshi ("rotten women").
Western fans often use the term Yaoi to refer to anything in the BL category.
Well coming from japan there's probably a hentai made by the official company, and much more produced by fans.
Also the most narm and cringe worthy undercurrent of homoeroticism for me was in Death Note, at the end of season one right before a certain thing happened between L and Rem (the foot scene).
pretty boy lead who's lost his memory? he's a bit girly, probably a bit sexually confused. He does some stuff he's not proud of, but eventually redeems himself, probably disovering he's a secret government clone/robot along the way.
YAWN. exactly like every other manga then.
aka Japanese slash fiction. Hehe.
What's the difference between "writing the English adaptation" and "translating" . . . does the story/content really get changed that much when these are brought to the non-Japanese market?
stratosfyr: If a manga is described as "bishonen" or "bishoujo" it means it's about pretty boys or girls.
Bishounen and bishoujo are not genres - there's no such thing as a "bishounen manga" or "bishoujo manga". "Bishounen" ("pretty boy") is a description of a character type - a thin, feminine-looking young man who is the object of a lot of shallow, mostly-chaste fascination from both sexes. The term describes appearance only - it doesn't imply anything about the character's sexuality or personality. Bishounen can appear in any genre of manga, even extremely heterosexual stuff intended for guys.
"Bishoujo" ("pretty girl") isn't used as much as "bishounen." I've got the vague impression that the word sounds kind of cheesy and dated (and possibly kind of creepy?) to most Japanese people now.
Crunchbird: What's the difference between "writing the English adaptation" and "translating" . . . does the story/content really get changed that much when these are brought to the non-Japanese market?
Usually, no. That would be a lot of work! What most American manga publishers do is hire 1) a Japanese-speaking translator, who will write a "raw," very literal-sounding translation, and 2) a probably-non-Japanese-speaking adapter/localizer - basically, a writer - who will turn the raw translation into natural-sounding English. (At the people who think this second step unnecessary or somehow dishonest, I laugh.) I'm guessing this happens because people who are both fluent in both languages and are competent writers are uncommon and expensive to hire.
The strategy can, obviously, work out badly. Sometimes the translation is too literal (read: lazy or incompetent), and doesn't explain when a line is idiomatic (Educational Notice - "she has a light ass" means "she is promiscuous"), or is a quote from something (Educational Notice - if someone talks about coming out of a dark tunnel into Something Country, they are making a humorous reference to the first line of a book called Snow Country), or just carries some sort of meaning it doesn't in English. (Educational Notice - Japanese grammar doesn't require that the sentence have an object/subject, and male and female pronouns are rarely used. So it's entirely possible that that murder witness's statement that "he killed her!" was actually just, "killed her!" or even "killed him!" So later on we may very well discover that what the witness was actually trying to get across was "I killed her!" or "the reincarnation of Joan of Arc killed the Prime Minister!")
Also, the adapter might be a crappy writer, and the dialog just comes out sounding awkward and confusing, regardless of how carefully the translator annotated his/her work. Or sometimes a little of both; or sometimes I'm sure there are just communication problems. I'm not sure exactly what went wrong with the Del Rey adaptation of Mushishi, but it's painfully inferior to a certain illegal-type translation by a mystery internet person called Faust.