Tough Love at the Office: The Complete Yuri Collection

Friends, we speak today on the probity of the workplace. A strange space. Not the first place most people want to be, by and large. Even the people who quite like their work should properly have something they love more than work, as a rule. Just to keep your head in the game, and deny the man the satisfaction.

But workplace lust - ah, well. That hits different. Universally acknowledged. It’s rather a staple.

Speaking of hitting different, let’s talk battle manga. Specifically, a recent workplace shōnen battle serial compiled by Seven Seas, Tough Love at the Office: The Complete Yuri Collection. Translated by Alexa Frank and adapted by Asha Bardon, it reads like a dream. The language is intentionally dry, institutional. Subtext is rich, that can’t be easy. I believe it was originally serialized as Black & White. A brick of a book in softcover, almost five hundred pages, heavy in your hand. It’s a workplace story, a fight comic, and a riot of pure draftsmanship.  

Because, my god. Sal Jiang! What a meteoric talent. Absolutely incandescent. Lines practically jumping off the page.

So, yes: the book is focused like a laser on the space between two up-and-coming junior executives, Shirakawa and Kuroda. The story begins at the precise moment they first meet, introduced at the office. Work in this context is the canvas on which great deeds are accomplished, albeit in an abstracted way. The corporate work here is entirely of the kind that involves shuffling papers and yelling about meetings in a series of identical conference rooms, purposefully generic. Pure Patrick Bateman shit, if Patrick Bateman really cared about his job. But alas, he had something he loved more than work. 

It’s unmoored from real labor, pure middle-management paper chase. Everyone’s always talking about their position vis a vis the mysterious thaumaturgy of “accounts.” Work is a fantasy land. Work is just where these two crazy kids happen to meet. And the story shows us every moment the two share for the duration, a long sequence of events in which the two women do absolutely everything in their power to demolish one other.

This is the story of the strange universe formed when Shirakawa and Kuroda first meet. Nothing else in this universe is real except inasmuch as it is real in reference to Shirakawa and Kuroda. They are both predators, manipulating a series of more or less guileless secondaries into serving as their fire ships for this or that sortie. Almost every page of this story depicts an actual crime, the stuff of legendary workplace tort. These women are trying to kill each other at every moment, walking around the office covered in bruises, scrapes and cuts - in all the places covered by a blazer and skirt. There’s a lot of sexual harassment. So, yes, the fights are metaphors, just like fights are always metaphors, except in life, in which a fight only represents a defeat in principal.

It’s unnerving precisely because it’s work. That’s the frisson. The forbidden dance! Two people who want to rip each other apart on the level of ligature and bone are forced to work together all day every day. Of course there’s going to be collateral damage.

The story paces itself out, like any good fight property, by marking time between violent altercations, using that valuable real estate to establish motivation for the combatants to want to rip each other limb from limb. Gradually greater antagonists are introduced, endgame adversaries for the feuding rivals. But the series lives in those moments in which the two are actively trying to physically annihilate each other. 

There are no fantasy elements whatsoever. The only props on hand are what you’d expect to find in an office environment, the only fighting skills on display are the expression of untutored violence on the part of highly motivated individuals. It’s a straightened mythos, the elaborate costume of the professional fighter exchanged for the gray and black and white of the modern power suit.

It is also, I promise you, in the top five sexiest comics you will ever read in your life. However you want to put that list together, this is already in the top five. As in, your personal top five. You know what I mean. The real hat trick comes when the plot kicks in - ah, yes, I hear your thoughts from here, your brain seizing a bit. A plot? Oh, dear. This didn’t sound like a heavy plot affair. You promised sexy, not plot. 

It must be said: the story successfully levels up the stakes throughout. What had seemed a very intimate playing field between two lovers becomes a larger hunting ground for corporate sociopaths. At some point you twig to the fact that this is a tragedy. I really don’t want to spoil it because it’s a marvelous thing to watch this one grow and develop as it goes. 

The bitch of it is, my goodness, you come to love these people. They seem so alive on the page. Think about that aesthetic we mentioned a moment ago - can you imagine a more punishing and repetitive task for any comic book artist? Conan the Barbarian gets to have a different background every page. Shirakawa and Kuroda have a modern corporate dress code and an endless sequence of identical conference rooms and storage closets. Think about the dedication of Sal Jiang, committing to a mock epic of love, lust and betrayal in the most familiar milieu. Somehow, despite all that, it comes alive: a gothic labyrinth of endless square rooms with nothing on the walls, corporate functionality in every sinew of the world. Hungry lesbians with dark ambitions lurk behind every shadowy corner of a peculiarly ascetic universe.

I told you, this is fantastic. Book of the year contender. For real! Although Seven Seas put out a first volume of the story back in 2022, this marks the first time it’s been finished in English. It arrives at an auspicious time, a needed bulletin of vigor and passion. Unbridled erotic fury erupting in our midst. Absolutely riveting.

Tokyopop is slated to release a volume of Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko!, already my number one anticipated book of 2026. Remarkably, Sal Jiang produced both series during the same period of time, 2020-2023, seems very much a Desperation / The Regulators situation. That one has a television drama adaptation-  not even a cartoon, a whole-ass live action franchise. It is also about a workplace romance between two women, one of whom idolizes the other, who is oblivious. It also features a match up between a brunette in a sports coat and a bubbly blonde. She’s just got so much to say about these wonderful women she’s invented. 

Because Sal Jiang? My goodness. What a world of talent in those hands.

Why do you buy comics, friend? Interrogate yourself. Find an answer that makes sense. I buy comics for one simple reason: I really like looking at drawings. Every line in every comic book ever printed a confession of the artist, insight to unique temperament. Sal Jiang - friends, hearken to my words. She can draw cheekbones from any angle. There is nothing you or I can possibly tell her. These characters have weight, and mass, and breathe right there in front of you. There’s not a bum line in the book.

Much of the book lives in facial expression. These women are so specific. Shirakawa and Kuroda smile differently. They smile differently in different situations. The book changes stylistically, after the first span, which has more hatching and is drawn ever more closely to resemble Fist of the North Star. Once she gets the hang of their faces she starts drawing them with fewer lines. By the time you put the book down it's a small atrocity that these characters aren’t actually just going to walk off the page and continue living their lives, they feel so real.

Please, friend, do not doubt: you will weep before you close this book. Absolutely lose your shit. 

Every daring left turn pays off, even if it seems like it's wandering, it’s not. Nothing is extraneous: every side character represents an expansion of stakes as the dangerous game ripples outward from its primaries. Have you ever seen an office romance so toxic half the department ends up transferred out? Even after the book becomes less about fucking and more about professional destruction, it never loses sight of that focus: these two women clearly head over heels with one another, so much so they cannot rest until their rival is destroyed. What seems like a passionate affair becomes something with a lot more shades of grey. By the time the book is over the entire thing comes unraveled. It even ends with a holy renunciation of violence. Was this a toxic dynamic? Oh, yes, toxic enough to produce multiple casualties. And was one of the women taking it a lot more seriously than the other? 

But you don’t find out who until it’s too late. And they switch.

This is a book to break your heart, a work of fevered intensity and scrupulous ability. You don’t get to be this good at drawing women unless you really like looking at women, that’s just simple common sense. I respect that. And to see - to see the shape and form under the business casual. Anyone can draw muscles. The history of illustration would attest to the fact that showing the muscles wearing a shirt is the more significant challenge. Show me real clothes that feel and move like clothes. Show me the human animal, under duress. My god!

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