The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t a Guy at All Vol.1
Cartoonist: Sumiko Arai
Translator: Ajani Oloye
Letterer: Brandon Bovia
Publisher: Yen Press / $20
October 2024
She’s a fashion girl, her first secret is her love of 90s alternative music, her second the crush she has on the boy who works at the import music shop. He is the huH Magazine to her FRUiTS, a vision in black denim black hoodie black nail polish, and his secret is he’s the demure girl she sits next to in class every day. The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At All, it’s a complicated, crushed out situation, heavy on the Viola/Cesario, the boom boom thump of her heart beats along to an old heavy rock ’n’ roll song. Sumiko Arai plugs in the amplifier and turns it up.
And I mean totally crushed out. This comic is about desire, longing for someone who literally sits next to you and is still an unreachable, impossible distance away. The incomparable high she feels just being in her company. It’s about insecurity, how small she suddenly becomes when she offers a piece of herself. What did you think of that song? You’ve actually seen them live? Arai lets you see what’s in these two girls’ hearts, the shock and the wonder at finding each other, and then lets them blunder their way through it the way only young love can.
Just as real as the fierceness of new romance is the funny in watching somebody trying to hold it together when they’re around their crush. Arai gives you a peak into the mind doing mad sprints around and around in the skull, while the body language must remain aloof, just please let her think I’m cool. The desire to not act weird leading to acting really weird, massive overpreparation to seem extra casual, The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t a Guy At All nails it. A book that understands vulnerability.
It’s also about indulging in fantasy, not just sweetly awkward follies. The “Prince” is so overcome by the intensity of their feelings, she’ll sometimes do the suave stuff you dream about your crush doing for you before she can realize what she’s doing. It comes out simply sometimes, a gesture like lending a rained-on friend your sweatshirt. Sometimes it’s magic, donning a festival mask to keep her identity secret on the target range and hitting the big prize bullseye. Love the expectation for the nerdy girl to get flipped, that their silence comes off as cool, the popular kid is the one who is the nervous wreck. Love that, inside, the nerd is just as big a mess, too.
What brings the girls together is straight out of the 1994 BMG Music Catalog. The secret connection they have is their love of “western” music- not cowboy hats (more like Chris Gaines), western as opposed to the k-pop comebacks all the other girls in class get hyped about. BTS doesn’t move them like Beck, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam. Flirting is lending her the new Foo Fighters CD. Totally crushed out, making a playlist with Blur on it.
I must confess I find it hilarious the position this manga has put me in as a reader: the 90s alternative boom is from when I was a teen. Arai taps into the vibe of the sitcom by setting almost every scene either at the school or at the CD shop. The shop is where it gets a bit Spaced, collector nerds making fun of themselves. The cool uncle who owns the shop and his friends the regulars feeling graveside old all of a sudden, watching a couple teenagers renegotiate the meaning of music from his youth. He sees the love-letter playlist she made and thinks some old man creep is putting the moves on his teenage niece. To take the music of my long ago teen years and then make people my age the butt of a bunch of old people jokes: yes.
Music doesn’t belong to old men. Arai’s manga is talking about love, but it’s also busy smashing expectations. An emo kid from the century after alternative rock came and went, on the other side of the planet, is going to drop the disc in, hit play, and feel it. Same with the mondaine girl, fashion forward retro rocker. Music’s just the start; neither of these girls are going to let anyone else keep them from being themselves.
Arai is largely locked in to a nice, expressive modern manga art style, a bit more sketchy than solid, skewing toward magazines for older readers and away from a house Beat style. Or the global indie style you’d find at the ShortBox Comics Fair or a really cool Image book. But! Arai also loves to go full Bugs Bunny Looney Tunes with reactions. Things get ridiculously cartoony when a girl gets nervous (sweat beads like you would not believe) or simply blows up overreacting to some news, total face displacement. Love a good goofy reaction style and Arai’s is golden.
Also The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t a Guy At All is green. Printed in a duochrome of black and electric lime, Arai’s color work is highly stylized, super deliberate, surprisingly understated. It gives the manga the look of a gourmet comic from Peow2 (I’m thinking Michael Furler’s amateur cartoonist expert screwup Bark Bark Girl), or the sublime Nobrow dumpster fire lesbian romance graphic novel from Lucie Bryon, Thieves. Likewise, the original format Arai was working in before the Yen Press collection and translation limited each story’s length to four pages, creating a pace unusual for manga (that I’ve read), fewer longer chapters made of more shorter pieces. Arai moves to a vivid rhythm of small scenes in swift succession. The return of the sitcom with two score episodes per season.
The secret identity crush, Spider-Man behavior as well as What You Will. She doesn’t know the emo girl hiding behind the mask likes her back. She doesn’t know she already knows her. She doesn’t even know she is a she. The uncertainty that when the mask comes off, the girl beneath cancels out the crush, it’s not unfounded. It’s complicated. They both are, complicated, and they are both struggling with the discovery of each other, magic.
Manga royalty are already hailing Arai as creator of the new Nana, and I too can see Ai Yazawa in the opposites attract rock premise, and beyond. Every girl has a side to the story and you’ll hear it. Arai reminds me more of the earnest awkward of Skip and Loafer or the will-they-won’t-they in Dandadan than it does the slow burn romantic pining Cross Game or transgressive lows in River’s Edge. A now book. Tomorrow’s manga today.
The first volume of The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t a Guy at All is available from Yen Press or wherever better manga, comics, and books are sold.
English (US) · 