Makoto Tateno has quite a list of titles to her name, most of them being yaoi as far as I can see, with Yellow possibly being the most famous of her works in the English-speaking world. This however, is the first manga of hers that I have read.
Steal Moon is a sci-fi story, set in an unspecified time and location. Nozomi is a street-fighting champion and when he arrogantly promises to become somebody’s servant if they can beat him, so secure is he in his own prowess, he is promptly beaten and taken captive by the mysterious Coyote.
Waking up in an unknown room, he learns that he has been sold to a peeping website named Digital Angels, where anybody can log on and watch whatever he is doing 24/7. Trying to fight back against the system, he makes friends with two kids named Soma and Gyokuto, who are also in trapped in the Peeping Room website complex. After finding out the hard way that not making an effort to rack up the views on his room leads to the owners creating a ‘forced event’ (literally…) to up the tension, he becomes even more determined to get out of his current predicament.
Then the story changes entirely, when Coyote turns up again and along with the owner of the website, the mysterious and attractive Hermes explains to Nozomi that he is now a member of Selene, an organisation dedicated to ending the rule of some sort of observational computer named Mother Isis situated on the Moon.
Digital Angels, for all its claim to be a website designed to distract the computer’s attention from the characters actions in the real world, is blatantly just a way to up the sex-appeal with a rather voyeuristic touch for the reader. Whilst Hermes seems perfectly capable of putting the internet view to Nozumi’s room on a loop of him sleeping, it seems that this is forgotten for most of the time, so Coyote has to pretend to be seducing Nozumi in order to whisper him instructions.
Seduction wise, this volume has quite an even balance, seemingly occupied with both storyline and sex scenes. The scenes are very well done, being tasteful and well drawn, and every single character in this volume, of which there is not a single female, is very attractive. Makoto Tateno’s art is wonderful, as it manages to draw highly bishounen characters whilst not succumbing to the all-too-common yaoi need to make either one character a girl in a man’s body, or have incredibly skinny and childlike limbs. All of the characters are well-structured and drawn.
The storyline however, is not so well structured. Makoto Tateno hit on a good idea for this story with the Digital Angel’s website being an interesting concept, if a little perverted, but the addition of this strange concept of observation from the moon just confuses things, and is patchy both in explanations and actions. There’s an interesting twist at the end which livens things up for volume 2 but only adds to the confusion. Whilst the physical side of the relationships are portrayed well the emotional side is left somewhat adrift, remaining inconsistent and confusing in tandem with the storyline. The artwork is going to tempt me to read more, but as for the storyline, I sense that as a two volume series, Steal Moon is going to be one of those series that you read for the artwork, but not for the story.
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"I’m giving it a four for the artwork, but the storyline could have been incredibly interesting, rather than falling into the atypical but also incoherent sector."
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