Just imagine Lupin III crossed with Case Closed, with a teaspoon of gay love. That’s Gorgeous Carat Galaxy in a nutshell.
I’m not a fan of generic yaoi titles with plots straight out of mainstream porn, where the two characters are thrown together with minimal writing effort. Instead, I like to see some plot--any plot--and some character development, where the characters aren’t defined simply as the seme and the uke (the “top” and “bottom”, respectively and sexually speaking). Happily, this manga has a great plot.
Published by Digital Manga under their June imprint, Gorgeous Carat Galaxy is an oversized manga with a separate wrap-around cover, featuring our roguish main character, the master thief Noir. The actual cover is quite beautiful itself, with the cover images reprinted in a green wash. The first page is a full color glossy poster image of the central characters in the story. The regular pages are your standard manga pages; nothing really stands out.
The artwork runs along the typical style you find in yaoi, featuring bishounen with long, wispy hair, lots of close-up panels, and tones being used more than shading. Higuri includes a lot of detail in the panels, both in backgrounds and in accessories. Masculine and feminine characters look different, and that’s a tiny thing that I appreciate. The panels themselves feel well organized, with no wasted or empty space. The adaptation is clear and overall excellent, flowing easily in English.
Despite the nice visuals, I picked up Gorgeous Carat Galaxy for the story. I never thought I’d ever write this about a manga, but if you like gothic romance novels (yes, I am talking about the Ann Radcliffe type of novel), this is your book. It uses the basic format for gothic novels, and features many of its stock characters. The story centers around a mysterious castle surrounded by a garden called The Forest of Monsters, both of which are in disrepair. The castle is run by a distant relative of Florian, our penniless feminine main character who is “owned” by Ray Balzac Courland, otherwise known as the notorious master thief Noir, terror of the wealthy in Paris. Florian’s relative is selling the castle’s collection of artistic masterpieces in order to raise money to support Eleonora, the teenage daughter of the last owner of the castle, who lost his wife and went mad...running out into the cursed forest. Incidentally, Eleonora is quite mad herself, believing that she will die if she remains at the castle, yet she is the last guardian of the forest and its secret. Oh, and she believes that only Florian can save her...or die with her. Then people start to die at the castle where Florian, Noir and their sidekick companion, Lila are snowed in by a terrible blizzard.
In terms of hot-hot yaoi action...there isn’t much at all. Noir and Florian share embraces, and it’s clear in the writing and early jokes, and especially the meaningful looks that there is a lot of deep feeling between the men, but in this particular novel (Gorgeous Carat, the preceding manga series, is published by TOKYOPOP’s BLU imprint) Eleonora’s obsession for Florian overshadows their relationship throughout most of the book.
Gorgeous Carat Galaxy dabble into the cat-and-mouse action of detective-versus-master thief stories, but this lies at the edge of the story and is used mainly to tidy up the loose ends of the mystery and give the characters an exit from the story. The mystery of the castle and its forest garden is quite refreshing and will please fans of gothic novels, as well as fans of mysteries in general. For a manga published and marketed towards yaoi fangirls, Gorgeous Carat Galaxy is a mature choice with its deep storytelling and lack of explicit sexual content, focus instead on the heartstring bonds between partners.
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