Yellow Volume 3 (Yaoi)

Thank you sooo much. I love this series, and it was totally awesome!

Makoto Tateno really knows how to get you into a story and leave you wanting more! It's a great volume in a great series! If you like yaoi, you should buy the whole series! ^_^

When I started reading YELLOW, I thought, okay, a cute copy of FAKE, sorta like FAKE Lite. But once I start a series, I like to see it through, so I went into Volume 3 with no greater expectations than "they'll wait till Book 4 for the Big Moment between these two". Well, I was definitely wrong on that point. The author knows how to throw a curve ball when you're expecting a straight pitch, and the cliffhanger at the end of this volume was completely unnerving. With all the "trash yaoi" out there (with the standardized plots and predictable characters), this one is emerging as something on par with FAKE in its own right. As noted, do NOT start reading the series with this volume. You'll need info from the two previous books for it to make sense and to see how wonderfully the sexual tension is brought up step by step.

I will keep my review short as T. LaPonte "Mo" already did a comprehensive one. Tateno is one great mangaka. Her plot and characters development in Yellow just keeps getting better and better. If Vol 2 is good, Vol 3 is simply excellent. And Vol 4 could not be anything else but even better than Vol 3. Just the cliff hanger at the end of Vol 3 already convinces me it will be so. By now any fan of Yellow should know that Goh and Taki finally did it in Vol 3 and don't we just love it! And now for Vol 4 which is suppose to be out in June. But after observing DMP's recent trend I am sure Vol 4 will be delayed further. Sigh...

For those who are new to this series, Yellow is a yaoi (explicit "boys love," or "BL") manga series about two men-- one gay, one straight-- who steal illegal drugs and arms for a living. Volumes one and two dealt mostly with their job as "snatchers" and went a long way towards frustrating readers with the sexual tension build-up between the two main characters. We've gotten plenty of explicit content of each of the men in their individual love lives, but were thus far stopped short of seeing them reconcile their growing feelings for one another. I'll say though, for those who have not read volumes one and two yet, I wouldn't start with this one. You should go back and read the first two, or at least volume two, or you may be very lost. Old characters are not re-introduced, and a lot of the resolved issues and answered questions in this volume will be lost on anyone who is not already familiar with the subject matter. For the readers who have stuck with this series since the beginning, this volume is where your loyalty is going to pay off. Taki (our "straight" friend) has a dark past that he does not want anyone to know about, least of all Goh (our "gay" friend), whom he had finally admitted to being in love with last volume (and having admitted that he "loved" in volume one). Volume three picks right up where volume two left off. Things are still tense between our boys after the incident on the couch during that last case, but when the man they are to steal some heroin from turns up dead, things really heat up. Enter: Taki's "foster parents." I don't want to go into too much detail about these people, because it would ruin the surprises in this volume, but suffice to say, these two individuals did quite a bit to make Taki the man he turned into. When they show back up in his life, or rather, force themselves back into his life, Taki needs to make a very tough decision concerning his relationship with his partner. This volume is a page turner. I could not put it down from beginning to end. All those questions that have been building up over the course of the series are answered, though, not all are resolved completely. The explicit scenes up until now are nothing next to the one that occurs in this volume (oh, yes my fellow Yellow fans, it happens-- and incidentally, Goh has been rocketted up to the top spot on my list of favorite semes for his responsible usage of a condom in this volume; I love you, Goh!). Our fair author, Makoto Tateno, knows how to keep us hooked. By the end of volume three, I will guarantee you will be pulling out your hair waiting for volume four.