There’s a wonderful amount of variety to the kinds of sexy stories and seductive characters in Darling, You Drive Me Mad . Over the course of 10 chapters and 197 pages, Esuke introduces us to both unique male and female characters who have their own personalities, styles and body types. While one chapter might focus on a quiet and petite dark-skinned beauty, another would focus on a tall and busty tomboy yearning for romance. Each chapter stands out from the last thanks to the wonderfully diverse cast of characters and helps make sure the volume never gets stale or repetitive.
That success is due in part to the incredible artwork by Esuke. He uses soft tones of gray and generous amounts of blushing faces to add a smooth, soft sort of romantic tone to the artwork of his stories. Almost every chapter has a tender, vanilla aura to it, and that’s amplified by the delicate detail put into the faces of his characters. There’s wonderful detail in the full anatomy of each girl, as well. There’s an interesting combination of styles here where the positions and poses of the characters in Darling, You Drive Me Mad are drawn in an exaggerated and slightly unrealistic style but are paired with incredibly detailed and accurate sexual anatomy. The way soft and pillowy breasts hang from a girl as she’s arched over, or the intense way a man rams himself into a beautiful woman in these stories kept my eyes glued to each and every page.
The quality of Darling, You Drive Me Mad can also be contributed to the wonderful writing in the anthology. Each chapter is a simple, pure story of mutual attraction. Some stories begin with a slow, slightly sad tone before eventually reaching their pure, happy and sometimes romantic conclusion. Others focus strongly on the sexual nature of the relationship between the characters in the story, sometimes building up to big sexual experiences and other times simply diving right into the horny action. Whatever the style of the story is, Esuke does a wonderful job of developing memorable and engaging characters that help me care more about the erotic adventures that I’m reading.
A favorite of mine has to be the chapter titled Transmission. In this, a young guy named Yuu is dating a girl named Hibiki. She’s tall and gorgeous, with short hair and a huge pair of breasts hidden under a loose school sweater. She’s also incredibly unexpressive, often having a dead-pan face no matter the situation. When the two of them have sex, Yuu can’t help but notice that her face is even emotionless then, making him wonder if she isn’t really having a good time. Hibiki notices that her boyfriend is still feeling funky the next day after school, and decides to come over to watch another movie with him. When the two eventually start fooling around, he can’t help but realize that there’s a certain part of his girlfriend’s body that she never lets him touch. When he does, she immediately reacts out of sheer sensitivity, and from there, Yuu knows exactly what he has to do to get his girlfriend to change her deadpan expression.
I’ve definitely got a soft spot for hentai stories featuring expressionless girls. There’s something about their blunt and direct behavior as they navigate the world of sex, and the sudden twist when they eventually experience something that lifts their emotionless facade, that really appeals to me. Esuke absolutely gets it with the appeal of these kinds of girls, as this chapter of Darling, You Drive Me Mad expertly brings the busty beauty of Hibiki from her beginnings as a deadpan, direct girl to the ending destination of a moaning, gasping girl overwrought with the pleasure her boyfriend is helping her experience. It’s a sweet and satisfying story, and one of the best chapters of the volume by far.
Another highlight is Petal Princess Junkie. In this chapter, two schoolgirls are fooling around alone in a classroom at the end of the day. There’s the dainty and polite glasses-wearing Yuuki, and the sporty and incredibly horny pony-tail wearing Nakajima. The two of them are in the middle of getting incredibly intimate with each other until they get busted by their homeroom teacher Gocchin patroling the classrooms. He thinks he’s got them figured out and is ready to let them go with a warning, but when the two of them reveal that the reason they fool around with each other is that they’re both in love with him, he’s speechless. Before he can figure out a way to respond to them, Yuuki jumps onto his lap, Nakajima snaps a photo of the two of them, and the students beg their teacher to spend just one night with them or they’ll show the photo to everyone. Eventually, Gocchin gives in and decides to have sex with the two of them, but while they may have been in control at first, he quickly turns the tides and shows them the sexual prowess of a real adult.
While there are shades of gray to the morality of the story, I was a huge fan of it from beginning to end. There’s a great variety of action on the pages in this chapter, from moments of play between the two girls to the teacher spending time with each of them, to a finale with all three participating at once. It was fun to see the dominant and supposedly experienced attitude of Nakajima washed away once she witnessed the insane pleasure their teacher was capable of delivering to them. From beginning to end, this was one of the most erotic chapters of Darling, You Drive Me Mad by far.
Esuke is one of the most impressive FAKKU published artists by far. He has a masterful way of drawing a variety of different characters, from slender perky women to shy and busty girls. There’s an incredible amount of variety in Darling, You Drive Me Mad not just in the artwork, but with the characters and stories as well, that makes this a volume absolutely worth picking up. Darling, You Drive Me Mad by Esuke is available at our shop here, along with many other great hentai manga series.
