It appears that rom-com is a popular flavor lately, and it seems Akira Hiramoto, the author behind Prison School, RaW Hero, and Me and the Devil Blues is also jumping on the bandwagon. The January 2022 issue of Kodansha’s Weekly Shonen Magazine announced that Hiramoto-san was penning up an as-of-yet untitled romantic comedy manga, due for release in March of 2022.
The rom-com genre comes as a slight departure from his earlier works, which featured some romantic subplots without allowing romance to become the main focus. Prison School, one of his better-known works, was a visceral, sexually-supercharged series about a group of high school boys placed into an on-campus prison under the accusation of committing voyeurism. Under the wardenship of the Underground Student Council, the boys have to try to survive their one-month incarceration or face expulsion. Hiramoto’s ultra-detailed art style and penchant for fetishistic depictions truly shine forth in this series, though it’s a topic I would be remiss to bring up at the Thanksgiving dinner table.
Hiramoto also completed RaW Hero in August 2020, an action-comedy series focused on a young man desperate to support his family. After trying to stop a train molester, he becomes embroiled in a good-versus-evil conflict when he gets hired as a hero…by the very same train molester, who was just engaging in consensual exhibitionism, no less!
Me and the Devil Blues stands in stark contrast to Hiramoto’s other works, featuring a supernatural reimagining of the life of Robert Johnson, an African-American blues musician who was raised in rural Mississippi during the Great Depression. All of those elements are rather rare in today’s selection of manga, and I have to give props to Hiramoto for exploring such a unique topic.
With all that put into perspective, it’ll be interesting to see how Hiramoto tackles the rom-com genre. When you take a fetishistic sex-comedy like Prison School and juxtapose it against a gritty, psychological, quasi-historical tale like Me and the Devil Blues, it really speaks to Hiramoto’s gumption in tackling various genres. I’ll definitely be looking forward to what he releases in March 2022.
If you want to keep yourself…uh, stimulated until March, we have plenty of toys for sale in the store! Girls, we got you covered too.
Source: Anime News Network
