(Edited because I’m kind of an idiot. Thanks, Kevin!)
I haven’t read a lot of shônen-ai or yaoi manga, but I did enjoy Sanami Matoh’s Fake (Tokyopop) a great deal. It made up for a rather bizarre portrait of detective work with charismatic characters involved in an engrossing romance. So when I ran across Matoh’s Until the Full Moon (Broccoli Books), I got my hopes up. Unfortunately, Until the Full Moon has flaws in common with Fake without sharing its strengths.
The story stars Marlo, son of a vampire father and werewolf mother. He seems not to have inherited either fangs or fur, but he does turn into a woman during a full moon. Marlo’s parents call upon an old friend, Dr. Vincent (a vampire), to see if there’s anything to be done for Marlo. Dr. Vincent can’t help with Marlo’s condition, but he does suggest that Marlo marry Dr. Vincent’s son David during “that time of the month.” Marlo and David had a close friendship has children but fell out of touch, particularly when Marlo failed to manifest any vampiric or lycanthropic tendencies during puberty.
With all of these monstrous archetypes mixing and mingling, you might expect some suspense. Unfortunately, Matoh seems no more interested in creating a consistent mythology for Until the Full Moon than she was in crafting a believable detective squad for Fake. I’m not going to argue that the world needs still another take on this particular kind of lore, but the fact that most of the characters are vampires seems irrelevant. Few of what I think of as the traditional elements are in evidence beyond the blood drinking, and even that’s fairly incidental, even genteel.
The vampires don’t really kill anyone so much as withdraw the occasional pint or two from a comely village maiden (off-panel, no less). There’s no indication that they’re viewed with distrust or fear, and they generally behave like well-mannered landed gentry with a tiny variation in dietary habits. Since they’ve been stripped of anything resembling menace, they lose a lot of the accompanying eroticism. They aren’t blood-sucking fiends so much as blood-sipping dilettantes. The werewolves get even less attention, except to note that gender change is a not-uncommon side effect, particularly during mating season. (Pause to listen to the sounds of heads scratching.)
So, with a somewhat baffling and (forgive me) defanged mythos cluttering up the works, that would theoretically leave the characters to make it worth the reader’s time. Sadly, complicated genetic heritage and gender bending aside, they’re as dull as they are pretty.
Marlo could be expected to have some real ambivalence about his situation. His life hasn’t turned out at all as he’d expected, everyone around him is making choices for him, and nobody’s listening to what he wants. But Marlo comes off as more petulant than sincerely upset or angry. He’s fond of David, but he worries that his betrothed is too fickle to trust. That’s pretty much as deep as Marlo’s angst goes.
If possible, David has even less going on in his pretty little head. He’s fine with his father’s proposed solution, because he claims to like Marlo either way, as boy or girl. I’m still not sure whether that’s because David values Marlo for the nobility of his/her soul or if he just thinks Marlo looks hot no matter which parts come standard. He’s dull either way you read it, so it isn’t like it matters. Together, they manage to be even less than the sum of their parts, lacking any real romantic chemistry.
That leaves looking at the pretty pictures, and Matoh certainly does some fine work. Unfortunately, despite the wealth of fairly dramatic transformations the cast can undergo, Matoh doesn’t really render any of the seriously mythological moments the story could include. It’s mostly well-dressed, undead nobility hanging around nicely decorated manor houses. It’s pretty stuff, but it’s fairly static.
Remember that scene from Victor/Victoria where James Garner tells Julie Andrews that he doesn’t care if she is a man, and then kisses her? And Julie Andrews gets misty because he’s all evolved and hot, but it’s bullshit, because James Garner already knows perfectly well that she’s a woman, so he’s talking out of his hat? The gender-switching in Until the Full Moon has kind of the same effect. David loves Marlo as either a man or a woman; Marlo cares for David in return. The gender shenanigans don’t really make any difference, and they probably wouldn’t even if the characters were more engaging.
In the final analysis Until the Full Moon is a miss. A talented manga-ka has taken an interesting premise, sanded all of the rough edges off of it, and left readers with something pretty, but pretty dull.