(This Week's Episode: In which our manga explorer considers an old English teleseries and the vagaries of the shojo readership. . .)

Several months back, I noticed that BBC America was running old episodes of the Roger Moore teleseries, The Saint, as part of its Friday night lineup. I was never a big fan of the show when it first ran (was more of an Emma Peel lover), but I did remember it as being a moderately entertaining British adventure series. A few re-viewings of the show, though, and I was thoroughly disabused of even that modest assessment. Viewed thirty-plus years later, the show was completely lame: rote crime stories told as turgidly and sketchily as possible, over-relying on a faded type of 60's faux continental "glamour" and Moore's winking performance to mask its unoriginality. Unlike some 60's artifacts, The Saint had not aged well.

At one point in the first volume of Yasuko Aioke's From Eroica With Love (CMX), I recalled those dated episodes, a comparison that at first surprised me, but ultimately held through my reading of the rest of the book. According to a site of English speaking Eroica fans, Aioke's series first began in the late seventies, continued into the early eighties and then went on hiatus until the early nineties while the artist presumably worked on other projects. The first volume reprints the initial three episodes from the 70's, and you can definitely see the era in the artist's vision of moneyed Europe. But are the results as out-of-time as The Saint?

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From Eroica With Love focuses on the adventures of Earl Dorian Red Gloria (a.k.a. "Eroica"), a decadent aristocrat who doubles as an art thief. It's Eroica who graces the cover of the first volume. Willowy, with long blond curly tresses and big dream eyes, bedecked with a large unsubtle lavender corsage and beads, he's presented from the get-go as an unambiguously gay hero, though - unless I glazed over it - the word "gay" is never used. (The book's packagers attempt to sidestep the issue, of course, by calling him "flamboyant" on the back cover promo text.) Originally published in the Japanese shojo mag, Princess, the series appears to fit within the manga sub-genre of series written for adolescent girls (the book is labeled "Teen") that openly focus on male/male relationships. Not a topic I would've expected to find in DC's Comics' opening wave of translated manga titles, but apparently the company isn't as cautious with its new line as I would've guessed it'd be.

Volume One opens on a trio of characters who apparently will become superfluous as the series progresses: Sugar Plum, a sixteen-year-old art student; Leopard Solid, a stunt man and Caesar Gabriel, an eighteen-year-old dreamy blond art expert and instructor. All three of these figures are gifted with extra-sensory perception (they can communicate telepathically, while Sugar also gets premonitions), though aside from the first story, the only member of the trio to get much face time is the wispy Caesar, who himself resembles one of the stunningly beautiful male figures from classical sculpture. (In the first story, in fact, he is used as the model for a statue that's improbably sculpted by Sugar and Leopald to set a trap for the Earl.) Caesar is described as virginal and extraordinarily naïve about all matters sexual ("He's so late blooming that it's a miracle," we're told. "He's never had a crush on anyone in his 18 years of life!") With that kind of introduction, you just know that Caesar's virginal proclivities are gonna be put to the test - and indeed they are.