Shout out loud!

Title: Shout out loud!
Pictures and words: Satosumi Takaguchi
Published: 2006 (1996 in Japan)
Genre: Drama/comedy/romance say the books themselves
Pages: 5 times ~180 pages


Oh hi there. Long time no update. Yeah, I've been a bit lazy with the internets. But here we go!

Shout out loud! is one of my five favourite manga series (the others are Hellsing, Princess Knight, Yami no matsuei and Tokyo Babylon, in no particular order), and the first time I read it was some six years ago, when it was scanlated on the net. That's scanned and translated, unofficially by fans. It was pretty much love at first sight: Takaguchi's art is very beautiful and effortless. It's not generic manga art with the big eyes and stuff, although it has its fair share of SD expressions and other usual effects. But not too much to disturb the flow of the beautiful black ink.

What's it about then? It's about a voice actor, Hisae Shino, who, at the age of 33, finds out that he's the father of a 17-year old hockey playing boy, Nakaya. Nakaya's mother has died, and he has decided that he wants to live with his father instead of his mother's family. Shino, unmarried and quite naive, is happy to take him in, but isn't quite prepared for everything that having a kid brings along. For one, Shino has to start making a lot more money, which means taking all kinds of jobs, even yaoi CD's.

Throw in the colleague who becomes more than a little interested in Shino, and the hockey coach Nakaya suddenly finds very interesting, some more colleagues and even a horny teacher, and both father and son are soon involved in some hot man-on-man action. Uh, that makes Shout out loud! sound like a dirty, dirty yaoi series. But it's quite sweet, really. The characters are real enough that you'd want to slap them every now and then, and like I said, the art is very pretty. And! It's also interesting to have a look at how voice actors work.

Kind of hard to choose a quote, or to quote a comic book, so here's the cover of the last album, featuring father, son, and the man who wants to get into daddy's pants (er, one of them, anyway!).