Dibs

Admit it. You get soooo hot over those preternaturally huge eyes, that wild flowing hair and the cute way those sailor-suited schoolgirls and cone-breasted androids wreak havoc and save damaged planets. It’s all female Japanese cartoon characters all the time at Yuricon, the Tokyo convention for fans and creators of lesbian manga and anime. Yaoi is Japanimation/comix featuring gay male love; yuri — the word means “lily” in Japanese — is its lesbian counterpart. Fans include lesbians, but also curious teen girls and guys of all kinds who believe two gals are better than one. More and more yuri is getting translated into English every year, and a fav occupation of yuri fans is to search for girl-girl love — vis-a-vis touching, or crushes, or longing looks — in old favorite animanga such as Sailormoon. This year’s Yuricon was held April 17, chaired by yuri manga artist Rica Takashima and sponsored by Erica Friedman, whose Newark, New Jersey-based ALC Publishing company issues yuri manga in the US. Friedman also heads Yurikon LLC and hosts Yurikon.com, which offers hot stuff for fans “on the lookout for cool, butchy, cute anime and manga lesbians” and lets users augment a master list of “lesbians, wannabees and oughtabes in anime and manga.”