One of my most popular posts is How To Find Bara in English — bara being a term commonly used to refer to gay comics created by Japanese male creators. In that post, I link to sites that host bara scanlations. As a creator myself, I have mixed feelings about doing this — on the one hand, the vast majority of these scanlations are certainly being distributed without the creator’s permission; on the other, the vast majority simply aren’t available for purchase in English and it’s my hope that by increasing awareness of bara, I will also increase demand.

But I had another purpose for that post: to make readers aware that there are legitimate ways for non-Japanese readers to purchase bara manga and thus compensate the creators for their hard work. It’s sort of a stealth plan — come to see sources for free downloads, but wait! Here’s where you can go do the right thing, support the creators and even find bara (and yaoi) manga not available through piracy.

Based on some of the feedback I’ve gotten, it’s seems like a lot of readers are interested in doing the right thing, just so long as they have a way to — and purchasing e-manga straight from Japan is one of the most direct ways to do that. But seeing as many of us don’t read Japanese, navigating a Japanese Web site has felt… daunting. To help out, I linked to an excellent walkthrough by *elee0228 showing how to use the Webmoney service to purchase and download works from the very popular Digiket market.

Alas, for the past several months, readers in the U.S. have been having problems using this method and thus there hasn’t been a really awesome way for us to purchase e-manga straight from Japan.

Well, now reader UltimaST has come to the rescue! On his own, he created a walkthrough for Surpara.com and has given me his kind permission to post it here. Surpara.com is an e-manga site that has lots of yaoi and bara downloads. And, even better than Digiket, it allows you to use your regular old credit card to pay!

So, here’s the step-by-step:

1) The Japanese gay comics can be found at

http://mk2.surpara.com/

so start there.

2) You’ll be taken to an age-check splash screen. If you’re over 18, click yes. (And click the images below to enlarge.)

3) After you find the manga you want to download, click the marked location to add the manga to your shopping basket.

4) You are taken to this screen which displays your shopping basket. You can either continue to shop or just press the next button (marked):

5) You are then taken to a screen where you could enter your ID and password if you were a registered member — but you don’t need to. Instead, just check the marked box next to the red message:

6) Scroll down the page to find the choice-of-payment section. Fill in the spaces as follows:

1 – enter your email
2 – retype your email

And then check the marked location next to the credit card icons.

7) The next screen is a summary of your purchase. Just click the marked location to continue.

8. You are now taken to the screen to enter your credit card information. Fill in the spaces as follows:

1 – enter the name of the credit card holder
2 – enter the number of the credit card
3 – enter the expiration date of the credit card

Then press the marked continue button.

9) If the transaction went through as intended, you will get this screen. Just click the blue link. (If you get anything else, the transaction didn’t go through.)

10) After that, you will get an email with a link to a download page that looks like the one below. Click the marked download icon and you’ll be able to save your manga to your hard drive!

So, there’s you have it — a walk-through on how to download manga from Surpara.com using your plain old credit card. I tried it myself and it worked fine. And they seem to have a nice selection of bara/yaoi downloads.

That said, I just want to give you a heads-up about a couple things. First, is that about a week after I downloaded my manga from Surpara, I received their newsletter in my email inbox. I’m not wild about getting marketing materials I didn’t specifically sign up for (especially when it’s all in Japanese!), so here’s what I had to do to unsubscribe.

1) First I clicked the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email: http://mk2.surpara.com/mag.php

2) Then I was yet again taken to the age-check screen. Being over 18 years of age, I clicked “yes”.

3) Then I was taken to the unsubscribe screen. I needed to enter my email into the 2nd (marked) field and click the grey button next to it.

4) Which brought me to this screen, letting me know my email address was unsubscribed from their marketing materials:

The other heads-up I want to give you is that some of the manga and pin-ups you can download from Surpara feature manga characters who are supposed to be under the age of 18. It is currently illegal in the U.S. to receive obscene cartoons depicting minors in sexual situations through the mail or the Internet. Yes, I consider the law tremendously misguided—and at the moment, at least in the U.S., prosecutors seem to mainly use it to add extra punishment to those who also possess and distribute actual child pornography—but because I care about your safety, I would advise you to choose your downloads with the local laws in mind.

All that said, I believe UltimaST has done a great service to both us and the creators we admire by creating this walkthrough. Please let me know about your experiences in the comments—and be sure to give UltimaST a special “thank you” shout-out!

Hey! Want links to full-color yaoi/bara comics sent to you — for free? Just sign up over at our Free Comic page and we’ll send you the download link to our first comic right away!

Enjoy reading articles like these? Don’t miss out! Get Yaoi 911â„¢ emailed right to you — for free!

Learn More!

• Curious about the next comic we’ll be sending out to our newsletter subscribers? Then read all about our High School rescue-and-romance Boys Love story, Tough!
• Want to read about other creators’ yaoi? Take a look at our in-depth Yaoi Reviews!
• Interested in creating your own manga? Start with How to Write a Full Comic Book Script and How to Find the Perfect Yaoi Artist for your Graphic Novel!
• Would you like to read more about how the law treats readers of manga with underage characters? Read about the Christopher Handley case in How To Keep Manga Fans Out Of Jail and then be sure to check out Cartoon Teen Sex and the Law!

Since Baralover, a very popular site with lots of English-language scanlated bara manga, went down at the end of July, I’ve received a number of questions from users about what happened to it. I wrote to Kyo, the webmaster, shortly after I noticed Baralover was delivering a 404-error message and just now have gotten a reply:

unfortunately due to 110MB no longer supporting adult websites, I have decided to let the site be shut down.
it wasn’t a fun decision, but it was the conclusion I came to after a month of thinking it over.
I meant to put up a nice goodbye note on the site, but unfortunately by that time it was already too late (they took down the site a WEEK before the deadline!!)

i’m sorry to disappoint you guys but i’ve moved onto some other things in my life right now.
HOWEVER, if you know Saru-X, then you’ll be glad to know that he and a friend are hoping to make a site to be the next Baralover!
or at least they’re hoping too eventually…

in the meantime, just be sure to keep up on the Bara Board ( http://ib4f.com/board/bara0 )
and watch for anouncements – once my home server comes back from the dead, i’m going to upload ALL my bara manga onto a public Mediafire account for everyone to access.

also note that the Bara chat is still up and active, since it wasn’t run on the website itself. it can still be accessed by http://www.xat.com/baralovers
i’m hoping that stays alive enough to put into another website, if i ever make another one.

So, there you have it. 110MB was the hosting provider for Baralover and it looks like they changed their terms of service so it was no longer acceptable for Kyo to host bara scanlations there. These things can happen, but it’s a shame they took down the site before Kyo could post up an explanation for his readers. While I am somewhat ambivalent about scanlations in general, I wish to thank Kyo for his contribution to popularizing this genre. It is my hope that as interest catches on that it will be more likely that a Western publisher will print bara books and Kyo’s Web site offered a very nice, accessible introduction to bara to English-language readers. I wish both Kyo and Saru-X luck with their plans to create new Web sites and will let you know when they are up.

In the meantime, there are still some other nice places to find bara in English, which you can find (along with some other thoughts I have on bara vs. yaoi) in my post

How To Find Bara In English

If you haven’t already, feel free to give that a look!

Bara Art from Kowmeiism
© 2008 Kowmeiism

Like any blogger, I keep an eye on my Web site’s stats and visitors and I’ve discovered that a significant number of readers come here though search engines looking for “bara” — that is, Japanese gay male romance manga written by gay men for gay men (referred to by some as “muscle yaoi” due to the fact that the character design often is fairly muscular — particularly compared to traditional yaoi-style bishonen.)

As I’ve mentioned before, discussions of bara in English — let alone English translations — have been hard to come by. But this looks like this might be starting to change. As a service to my readers, I will use this post to provide links for English-speakers to explore Bara manga. I will update it as I discover more sites (and if you have any other suggestions, please include them in the comments!)

(Needless to say, the links I’m including below are ALL Not Safe For Work [or for looking at in front of Grandma, etc.] — you’ve been warned [or encouraged, depending... ])

Bara is hot

First off, let me get this off my chest — I find bara quite hot, more so than many (but not all) of the yaoi works I’ve read and certainly much more than traditional Western gay male comics.

It’s fairly easy for me to put my finger on what it is about bara that beats out the majority of what gets published in Western gay male comics (such as what you might find at, say, Class Comics) — it’s the character design. Bara guys tend to be fairly muscular, which is not so different than what you’d find in Western gay comics. What does seem different is the obsession with monstrous proportions we seem to have in the west.

Take for example the work of LOGAN. This is a gay male comics artist whose artwork I find absolutely superb — he’s got serious chops in terms of linework, colors, composition, you name it. But his men leave me icy cold. Their muscles have muscles and the penises appear easily as large as my forearm. I understand that this sort of thing is hot for some (just like I’m aware that monstrous-sized breasts are appealing to certain straight boys), but for me, looking at this artwork doesn’t turn me on — I just want to buy these poor fellows a back-brace or something. (For a particularly freaky understanding of this, step into the uncanny valley with me and check out some of LOGAN’s Poser artwork.)

Now, I’m sure that serious bara fans would be able to provide me with links to Bara Of Unusual Size, but my point is that this sort of design seems to be the norm with Western gay comics and not so much with the Japanese ones. Likewise, and this is done less often (as there is a fair amount of “twink” art), this “super-sizing” also seems to apply to depictions of hypermasculinity in Western gay comics’ design — making all the guys super-furry, tough-looking and ideally wrapped up in a whole lotta leather. (Ultimately, I suppose we can thank the influence of Tom of Finland for much of this.) It just feels to me like it’s trying way too hard, protesting too much, so while Your Mileage May Vary, for me it’s a big meh. I’m just not much for extremes, in real life or in comic art, so there we are.

And now that I think of it, one reason why bara might often be hotter for me than much of yaoi probably has to do with avoiding another extreme — the hyperfeminization you often find in the design of male characters. Not surprisingly, as a gay man I like my guys to look like guys. Now of course, some yaoi artists like that too — and their art I often will find erotic — but for those who don’t, well I can appreciate the romance in those books, but it won’t get my motor running.

So bara carves out a bit of a happy medium for me in terms of how the guys look — and that makes its artwork especially appealing for me.

(And to be perfectly honest, I’ve found that there is some technical understanding of how gay sex usually works in real life that the bara creators seem to get a bit better. While there does seem to be a fair amount of the inevitable anal intercourse consummation that you find in yaoi works, there also seems to be a deeper awareness that oral sex and mutual masturbation are also considered equally valid and fulfilling ways for two guys to make love — and that anal sex isn’t necessarily something first-timers would be down for. I find this understanding makes the sex more believable for me and thus, ultimately, hotter. Again, I’m sure we could find yaoi/bara examples that disprove the rule, but speaking generally, this is a distinction I’ve found appealing.)

A Good Place to Start

So hopefully I’ll be able to add a number of links to this post, but I found that good place to start for a nice sample of bara in English is at

Baralover (EDIT 7/31/10: Yikes! For the past 24 hours the Baralover link has been delivering a 404 – Not Found page. Hopefully it’s a temporary glitch, but if it’s not resolved in a week, I’ll remove the link here… EDIT 8/17/10: It’s still down. I sent an email to the owner but did not receive a reply. I did find this update of sorts over at BARA Club. We’ll see how this develops. EDIT 9/1/10: And now we have an explanation — looks like Baralover is down for the count for the foreseeable future.)

So, in the meantime, please look below for links to more sites with English-translated bara!)

At this site you will find bara manga from a good-sized variety of creators all translated into English. Now, be warned, these are scanlations — meaning that the original creators have NOT been compensated for the work you are downloading. There is a complicated (and sometimes ignored) system of ethics that scanlators follow in order to respect the artists they admire that mostly boils down to “We will only make available works that you cannot already buy in English — and as soon as English-language versions are published, we will remove our scanlations and encourage you to buy the for-pay books.”

As a creator myself (with limited financial resources), I have mixed feelings about scanlations. On the one hand, I do believe that increasing the exposure of niche works can ultimately benefit creators and publishers commercially (which is why I am making and will continue to make available free downloads of some of our comics.) But, on the other hand, no one has asked any of these creators for their permission to post these works — and I certainly wouldn’t be happy to have that decision taken out of my hands. And no matter how you frame it, it is piracy — and at least according to a panel discussion I heard at YaoiCon, this sort of online piracy has devastated the manhwa market in Korea.

So please, please, please — if you like what you see in some of these links, do take the time to compensate the original creators. A few bucks from you makes a huge difference in how much future work they can create. (Check out the sections below for ways to find and pay creators for bara downloads.)

OTHER SOURCES

First off, if you’re liking this bara stuff, let me humbly suggest you take a moment to check out our comics, like Tough: “No Kissing” which has a hot guy-on-guy painted cover and art and is a free download for our subscribers. Just saying…

Other great places (last update 8/4/11):

http://bara.fuzzybuns.org/
- Kyo, the original webmaster of Baralover just sent me the link to this saying “someone has made a sequel to my old Baralover website”. I’ve checked it out, and so far, it looks pretty great!

Comiz.net
- Lots of full scans of bara mangas from famous creators in an easy to read format. Most are scanlated into English. Definitely worth your time.
BARA – Club (+18) [Yaoi]
- Lots of hot images, lots of links to scanlated Bara. A nice forum to talk about it all. You have to register to get access to the links, but the process is quick and painless. Some pop-up windows seem to have been recently added, though…
Baraspot
- Bara boards site with lots of art (updated link!)
The Bara Forums
- Currently active discussions and postings on Bara (with lots of images), worth your time (but looks like the spammers might be taking over…)
Bara Club on MyAnimeList
SoupGoblin’s Stash
- A variety of bara-themed posts and images (includes some photos, some furry, but lots of bara art), definitely worth your time
Daphira Scans
- Not updated since 2007 but some good work
The baralovers community at LiveJournal
TAKU HiRAKU’s iLLUSTLATiON SiTE
- Creator site with explicit bara, lots of nice images (NON-ENGLISH)
ウホクエ
- chubby cartoonish bara, and all by the same artist (I think) NON-ENGLISH

SOME TUMBLR BLOGS

On the plus side, these sites have well-drawn and very explicit pin-up art, often updated everyday. On the downside, they almost never credit the artist—which is frustrating as a viewer and deprives the artist of even the (non-consensual) gain of building a fan-base. Hopefully, the culture on these Tumblr blogs will change around that…

Bara all day, every day – does just what it says on the tin and the moderator seems willing to try to find out who the artists are if you ask nicely. For the artist’s sake, please ask.

The Queer Geek – lots of bara, with some Western art and photos. Quite nice. Also seems to list the artist more than others—also nice. Should be your first stop just for that reason alone.

bara-onda – offers a mix of Japanese and Western art in a thumbnail layout. Not the most convenient set-up, but there were some pics here I hadn’t seen elsewhere.

Rainbow Robin – a mix of Western art, bara and real-life photos. (Seems to have a lot more gay porn photos/animated gifs lately. And the comics art mostly concerns Robin and Batman.)

FUCK YES YAOI – lots of bara and Western art as well as slash. States in its FAQ that “slash” and “yaoi” are “the exact same thing”—which might come as a surprise to some original BL creators—but the moderator also expresses an interest in crediting the artists which is, at least, a nice thought.

(I’d also be remiss not to include a link to Japanese Gay Art here where a lot of the nicer pieces in the blogs above seem to come from and where you can purchase work and support artists. It’s a really well done site — definitely check it out.)

Buying Bara E-Books

Right now, as far as I know, there isn’t any bara being published in English (yet!). And it’s hard to get enthusiastic about (and ultimately want to support) work you can’t read. So, I will continue to look at Bara scanlations. But after sampling a bara author’s work through a scanlation, I try to do the right thing — I look for ways to get the creator money. This is both to balance out the free-work I have enjoyed and also to offer the creator support so they can create future work to enjoy. How do I compensate these creators? I buy their Japanese-language works. And there are actually a couple ways you can easily do this.

First off, some Japanese manga creators offer for-pay downloads of their work — and this work is often more recent stuff that hasn’t been scanlated yet.

Let’s say you’ve become quite taken with Kowmeiism’s comic “Judo Boy” (the opening image in this post [of that guy with the sword] is also by the same creator). A Google search brings you to his Web site and there you find a Download link page with some of his for-pay e-books. You click on one of the DiGiket download links and — after clicking through the “Yes I Am 18″ button [the first blue one on the left] — are brought to the DiGiket online manga marketplace page to download one of his manga.

At this point you might feel stymied — everything’s in Japanese, you see, and it’s not intuitively obvious how you’d pay for his work, let alone download it. Luckily, there is a simply excellent English-language walkthrough for how to download manga through DiGiket in a journal post over at elee0228′s DeviantArt page. Follow the instructions over at that page and it’s easy as pie to download DRM-free and very high-quality manga art.

(The payment method recommended by elee0228 is WebMoney — a Japanese form of electronic cash that uses special alphanumeric codes that you enter on payment Web sites. It’s very easy to use and it ensures your buying choices will be completely anonymous. In order to get myself some WebMoney to spend, I used kanetrade.com which provided me the WebMoney codes nearly instantaneously and whom, based on that experience, I feel comfortable recommending. They sell WebMoney codes in 1000 point increments and Digiket is smart enough to prompt you for a 2nd WebMoney code for the balance remaining if your first code doesn’t have enough to cover the cost of the manga download, so there is no need to sweat not having exact Yen amounts for the codes you buy.)

UPDATE 2-27-10: Also, for extra easiness, be sure to check out the Yaoi section (sidebar on the left under “Interests/Fetishes”) of the English-language DLSite. Lots of options from Japanese creators, descriptions in English, you can use a regular credit card. Easy, peasy. Should be your first stop. (Just ignore the boobies on the home page… )

UPDATE 12-27-10: And because some folks in the U.S. have been having a difficult time downloading from Digiket using WebMoney, a reader has created and allowed me to share a walkthrough for a similar Japanese site, Surpara.com, which also has the benefit of letting you use your regular credit card.

Buying Physical Bara Books

But what if a creator doesn’t have an e-book available over at DiGiket (or you can’t find it)?

A great place to get hardcopy Bara books is over at Rainbow Shoppers. They have a wide assortment of bara works that you can order including works by creators you’ll find on the Baralover page such as Takeshi Matsu and Tsukasa Matsuzaki. Just click on the “Comic” link in the left sidebar over at Rainbow Shoppers and work your way through the links it provides. They accept VISA and Mastercard and will ship to any location worldwide.

(Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to tell you that I actually have not yet ordered from Rainbow Shoppers, but I know those who have and they’ve had good experiences. Of course, all the books are still in Japanese. But the artwork is still gorgeous — and if you really appreciate a creator’s work, don’t you want to do the right thing and help make sure they can afford to keep making it? I thought you did. )

I’ll Keep Updating This List — with your help!

So I hope you found this post a useful introduction to getting your hands on some of that bara art that we’ve all been hearing rumblings about for some time. If you know of any other links that should be included in this post, please let me know in the comments!

(UPDATE: Tina Anderson has a nice listing of Japanese language sites and sources for bara at her blog — which is especially handy as it includes direct links to creators’ Web sites, including noting who sells at DiGiket. She also turned me on to the Top Ten List of Gay Comics over at Rainbow Shoppers.)

Hey! Want links to full-color yaoi/bara comics sent to you — for free? Just sign up over at our Free Comic page and we’ll send you the download link to our first comic right away!

Enjoy reading articles like these? Don’t miss out! Get Yaoi 911â„¢ emailed right to you — for free!

Learn More!

• Curious about the next comic we’ll be sending out to our newsletter subscribers? Then read all about our High School rescue-and-romance Boys Love story, Tough!
• Wondering why the heck I’m making a yaoi book? Check out Why This Gay Man Is Creating Yaoi!
• Want to read about other creators’ yaoi? Take a look at our in-depth Yaoi Reviews!
• Interested in creating your own manga? Start with How to Write a Full Comic Book Script and How to Find the Perfect Yaoi Artist for your Graphic Novel!

(EDIT: For links to English-language bara — and for a deeper comparison of the contrasts between yaoi, bara and Western gay male comics, check out our post “How To Find Bara In English”. Also, be sure to check out the comments of this post for more general information.)

In online discussions about yaoi and gay men appreciating yaoi, the subject of bara — Japanese gay male comics targeted at a gay male audience — invariably gets mentioned, but rarely does anyone seem to have much information to offer. I myself have often been curious about finding out more about this genre, but as the big publishers here seem to have taken little notice of it, I’ve had difficulty finding out anything of substance. (Let’s face it, even my ever-trusty Wikipedia draws a blank. EDIT 8/30/09: Yay! Wikipedia now finally has an entry for Bara — and it’s absolutely excellent! Very thorough and illuminating. Alex says “Check it out!” [And thank you to commenter SykoSilver for giving us the heads up!])

Well, Tina Anderson again comes to our rescue with her excellent overview of the topic in Bara is Not BL…but it Could Be? In it, she discusses the history of BL, its ups and downs in the Japanese market and why it might appeal to those of us in the states. She even has a nice selection of covers to share with us with the cute (muscular) boys.

Definitely worth a visit to Guns, Guys and Yaoi to check it out.

Psst! Want a free yaoi full-color yaoi comic? Just sign up over at our Free Comic page and we’ll send you the download link!


Enjoy reading articles like these? Don’t miss out! Get Yaoi 911â„¢ emailed right to you — for free!

Learn More!

• Want to check out some bara manga for yourself? Be sure to read our post “How to Find Bara in English”!
• Looking to find yourself great manga with hot guy-on-guy action? Check out our Yaoi Reviews!
• Curious to see what our guy-on-guy comic looks like? Take a look at our latest full-color yaoi comic Tough: No Kissing!
• Wondering why the heck a gay man is creating yaoi? Find out in Why This Gay Man Is Creating Yaoi!
• Want to learn how to make your own guy-on-guy graphic novels? Start with How to Write a Full Comic Book Script and How to Find the Perfect Yaoi Artist for your Graphic Novel!