Yaoi Magazine Overload
Using our fancy letter opener to cut Cool-B DVDs out of their plastic prison
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The other day, my friend asked me for help tracking down physical copies of
a Lawrence of Arabia BL manga, which I was able to find for her in about 2
minutes thanks my my encyclopedic* (*hardly) knowledge of second-hand JP
stores and buying things with proxies. Her request for assistance came right
in the middle of me stalking Surugaya and debating whether or not I should
buy a copy of Cool-B magazine simply because it had extra content on its
special DVD of a BL game that I am unhealthily obsessed with. After she
dropped $50 on niche yaoi, I decided that it was okay for me to do the same
thing, and I ended up buying six copies of the magazine (each with DVD
included) as well as a loose DVD that the site told me had a lot of
Nitro+Chiral wallpapers on it. My haul got here today and it is...
surreal... to say the least.
I have seen a few scans of Cool-B
before, but it is an entirely different thing to hold these magazines in
your hand and flip to a random page only to see a lovingly rendered, full
color double page spread of NSFW CGs from games I have never heard of. I'm
not going to lie, it's pretty embarrassing. I don't know these men like
that!!! Don't show me them going at it!!! However, my purchases have been
exceedingly worth it already, because I have tracked down new information
and images that (as far as I know) have not been posted anywhere that I
could find.
The copies I bought were:
Vol. 43 - May 2012 (DVD
only, no magazine)
Vol. 46 - November 2012
Vol. 50 - July 2013
Vol.
51 - September 2013
Vol. 52 - November 2013
Vol. 54 - March 2014
Vol. 58 - November 2014
The best purchases (for my purposes, anyway)
turned out to be volumes 43 and 58. I bought these issues specifically
because the Cool-B website said they included Hadaka content. The vol. 43
DVD had 20+ Hadaka wallpapers on it, and I am still buzzing with excitement,
because these included some new art I have not seen anywhere
before, as well as high quality versions of some art I have only seen as
crunchy JPEGs of postcards. This was easily worth the whole purchase tbh.
However, even more exciting was volume 58.
Vol. 58 was the once I
actually wanted the most desperately, and I was so stoked to see that they
had a copy in stock. Why, you may ask, this particular issue...? Because
this issue has an interview with Togo Mito about the Hadaka Shitsuji typing
game (?!?!?!?!), Hadaka Shitsuji Goldfinger. I did not really believe that
this existed or was ever going to exist, because when you Google it, you
only get the Cool-B backlog website and Togo Mito's own blog telling you to
go buy Cool-B to read about it. But now I have proof that it was, at least
at some point, going to exist. I still don't know if it got cancelled, or if
it fully released and just doesnt exist anymore (it has a retail price
listed and everything...). I have to TL the interview and see what it says.
But this is super exciting to me and nobody else, which is sometimes the
best kind of exciting.
At some point I hope to put all the wallpapers
up somewhere for archival purposes. As of right now I only saved the Hadaka
and N+C ones because those are the ones I cared about, but there are a lot
for other BL and otome games too. Arisato page will also get updated with
the new images of him. Oh my God I love him sooooooooo much. Seeing new art
of him made me go crazy. Anyway, big day for yaoi archivists everywhere.
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