June Manga's edition will keep the cover illustration of the original Japanese edition, but replace the Japanese cover copy.

Love Recipe is a boys’ love (BL) manga set in the offices of a publisher of boys’ love manga.  Tomonori Ozawa is a young editor for the yaoi manga (a sexually explicit sub-genre of BL) magazine, "Rose Boy," and Ozawa is practically neurotic about being a good editor.  The improvement in his professionalism isn’t helped by Rose Boy’s star creator, the mysterious Sakurako Kakyoin, who pretends to be a woman (which most yaoi creators are).  Kakyoin is madly and passionately in love with Ozawa, and he takes advantage of every opportunity to have sex with his young editor.

In Love Recipe, Vol. 2, Inukai, a young wannabe yaoi manga-ka, arrives at Rose Boy looking for work.  He has enough talent to catch Ozawa’s attention, and Ozawa has a pretty enough face to catch Inukai’s attention.  When it’s suggested that Sakurako Kakyoin take Inukai as an apprentice/assistant, Kakyoin is initially angry, but decides to be creative and wily in getting at what he sees as a rival for Ozawa’s affections.

THE LOWDOWN:  It’s safe to say that Love Recipe 2 doesn’t suffer because it’s too much of an insider’s view of the BL publishing industry.  With all its visual cues and plot points that come from BL and yaoi manga, Love Recipe 2 might come across as ironic or as meta-fiction.  Love Recipe 2 is a situation comedy and romantic comedy, so the publishing industry setting allows for comic situations.  Like any self-respecting yaoi, however, Love Recipe 2 is about romantic love culminating in physical love more than it’s a sitcom about the publishing industry.

The art is a strange hybrid.  Creator Kirico Higashizato uses sharp, thick, solid lines that occasionally jump and dance like livewires, and she has a mastery of figure drawing that allows her to bend faces and bodies for comic, dramatic, or romantic effect in the space of two panels.  Her illustrative style also adapts the techniques, design, and moods of romantic shoujo manga (girls’ comics) with flowery, glittery, and lace patterns in the backgrounds.  It’s very pretty art.  Love Recipe 2 has its faults, both in terms of the writing and the art, but it has that unknowable something that makes it fun.

POSSIBLE AUDIENCE:  Yaoi fans who enjoy comedy with their passion will enjoy Love Recipe 2.

B+