Poison Cherry Drive

"Cherry Drive - We are here to serve your needs. If you offer intrigues us, we will do anything to help you. We love gay and young, male customers (free of charge). We give priority to young male and gay clients. Fees are negotiable depending on the situation. We accept virgins and anal virgins (free of charge)..." is the internet-appearance of the agency "Cherry Drive" which might give you a clue as to what the protagonists of the title Poison Cherry Drive are interested in: Sex with gay virgins. And they're prepared to do literally anything to get it.

So, let's meet the president and vice president of the agency, Mamezo and Iida - both very cool and extremely good-looking gay men, not obviously into each other, but caring nonetheless - and their personal assistant Kenny Boy, who is straight and suffers from amnesia. They live together in an apartment where they also installed their office. They discuss every online application for a new assignment and debate whether to accept it or not.

The manga begins with the introduction of the first client, a boy which had been abused by a man. To ease the pain he goes to Cherry Drive and asks them to search for the man and do to him what he did to the boy. Although the boy is a so called "poisoned cherry" (i.e. not a virgin anymore) the agency accepts the case. They find the perpetrator, execute the boy's revenge and, by the way, cure the boy's phobia of naked men by exposing themselves naked to him in the most ridiculous ways and everyday situations.

Further clients show up and dangerous situation occur: In the second chapter we meet a "real cherry" - a businessman - who consequently drains Mamezos life sources. In the third chapter a traitor enters the agency; he has to be convinced that the agency is all right by being kidnapped and every kidnapped person suffers from the Stockholm Syndrome, of course. The last chapter is about a boy who pretends to have been raped by a prince of Saudi Arabia.

The art is remarkable: faces and figures are outlined very sharply. The most extraordinary eye-catchers are the chibis which I can only describe as bald, robot-like puppets - very expressive! There are few shadows, but the figures do not seem to be flat, because the perspective occurs to the reader by the movement of the character itself or the height of other figures in the panel. Backgrounds are rarely worked out thus exposing the characters all the more.

The panels are clearly separated by straight lines. The lettering is done in a round, what I would call futuristic type (this type is used for the lettering of the mangaka's name on the title, too) which suggested to me that this story might even be science fiction. The cover of this title is a colored picture of Mamezo and Iida which in my opinion didn't do them justice: the characters are much more elaborate in the story. This goes also for the portraits of the boys on the back cover (for I don't even know who one of them is supposed to be). The format of this title is the small and compact one without a dust jacket, which is typical for Kitty. There is no additional colored page inside. The paper-quality is quite rough and not well whitened.

To be honest, the title disappointed me right on the second page. I was really put off by the image of the boy lying there naked, wounded and in pain. I continued reading though, because I knew I could trust the first review: this is a very surrealistic story, and it's funny, if you get this kind of humor which is super-bizarre. If you have difficulty with surrealistic comedy - even if you think of yourself as a humorous person - I would suggest keeping your hand off this title.

So, fair warning! From my point of view: flawed but enjoyable.