Eric Arroyo recommends Sweet Blue Flowers
“You’re such a crybaby, Fumi.”
Those five words leapt across the ten years we had been apart like they weren’t even there.
Reading Sweet Blue Flowers feels like reminiscing about your adolescence, weaving through fractions of memories of your most important friendships. This beautiful girls’ love manga from Takako Shimura is as genuine as it is touching, showcasing Shimura’s exemplary storytelling with a cast of complex, honest, and handsome girls.
Sweet Blue Flowers follows Fumi Manjome and Akira Okudaira, a pair of childhood friends who are reunited during their first year of high school. Although they don’t recognize each other at first, the girls grow to support each other as they face trials of young adulthood, exploring their sexualities and entering new relationships, and balancing romance with friendship.
Manga-ka Takako Shimura is also the author of Wandering Son, a superb series about transgender adolescents that has regularly been on the ALA’s Rainbow Project Reading List. In Sweet Blue Flowers, Shimura portrays homosexuality with the same complexity as she does with gender in Wandering Son, featuring lesbian characters with varied perspectives on their own sexual identities, while still giving herself room to indulge in some all-girl school clichés. Shimura also creates a comfortable atmosphere in which characters openly accept and embrace queerness, while simultaneously acknowledging the realities of homophobia.
Sweet Blue Flowers focuses on the sensitive moments of friendship instead of the great dramatic arcs of romance, building a genuine and heartwarming portrayal of high school relationships that’s still layered and complicated. This isn’t a story that teases with will-they/won’t-theys or depends on melodramatic conflicts or situations. Instead, Shimura highlights the characters’ self-exploration; their romantic relationships are a natural part of their adjustment to young adulthood, and these relationships often involve leveraging past heartbreak with the possibility of new love.
Shimura’s sparse art is full of delicate linework and the perfect amount of detail to project the characters’ thoughts and emotions. Her use of the spatial relationships between characters can say more than the dialogue, and the scenes in which she draws characters kissing without focusing on the kiss itself are some of the most breath-taking moments in comics. They don’t just remind you of being in love; they bring you back to your first kiss, where you remember your short breaths and red-hot cheeks and not much else.
Having more of Takako Shimura’s work available in English is a treat, and Sweet Blue Flowers is an exceptional book for anyone looking for slice-of-life or romance comics.
Eric Alexander Arroyo is a Brooklyn-based cartoonist and a Digital Editor at comiXology. He’s probably drawing giant robots and listening to ABBA.