The Spring 2025 K-Comics Guide

Lover Boy 18+

What's It About? 

For Eunho Jung, there has always been one constant in life―his feelings for the boy-next-door, Jaeha Yoo. From a proposal at the age of three to a confession in his teenage years, the torch Eunho carries for the older man has never died out...not even when Jaeha got married. Now in college, a chance meeting leads Eunho to reconnect with the recently divorced Jaeha―and he'll do everything in his power to make his crush see him for the potential lover he is, not the cute kid he was. Will this finally be the right time, right place for these two? Or will Jaeha's inability to let love in lead them to crash and burn?

Lover Boy has a story and art by Zec, with English translation by Tapas Entertainment. This volume is lettered by Chana Conley. Published by Ize Press (April 22, 2025). Rated 18+.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

While I understand that no one has a say in when they're born in relation to someone else, age gap romances aren't always good at making that clear. That's often, I think, because they dabble in the forbidden, something Lover Boy is definitely playing with. The eponymous lover boy, Eunho, has been in love with Jaeha since he was three and Jaeha was eleven, and now that he's twenty, nothing on his end has changed. In fact, now he's legal, and he'd really like Jaeha to notice it.

What I like about Lover Boy is that it never leans too hard into the idea that this is a forbidden relationship. They've known each other for most of Eunho's life, yes, but despite Jaeha occasionally saying that Eunho is like his little brother, it's blatantly obvious that he doesn't really believe that. He's never been comfortable with the younger man's affection, but that largely comes down to Eunho being too young; now that there's a better balance between their ages (as in, they're both adults), he's finding it hard to keep resisting. And in part that's because he has less reason to resist even outside of Eunho's age. Jaeha is divorced and seeking solace in the arms of his old boyfriend, but there's a sense that he's just waiting for Hanjoon to leave just like his ex-wife did, and just like his father did long before that. As the book unfolds, we see that Jaeha is pretty much always waiting to be left, and part of his fear about starting a romance with Eunho is that it will cause the younger man to leave him, too.

While I wouldn't call this a portrait of a healthy relationship, it is an interesting one that is firmly rooted in both men's emotions. Eunho is remarkably steadfast, but it's not like he's been saving himself for Jaeha; he's tried to move on. (Both of them are unambiguously bisexual, which I like.) It's as if they simply can't get away from each other, and while Eunho might call that fate, I'm not sure Jaeha would see it the same way. Zec's almost black and white art does a nice job of showing the constant tilt towards each other, even when Jaeha is actively resisting, and it's when Hanjoon tries to keep them apart that Jaeha takes a step to keep Eunho by his side.

If one of the romantic leads having on-the-page sex with someone who is not the other romantic lead, this won't be your flavor of romance, but if that's not a dealbreaker, I think this has potential. It's more raw than I expected, but darn it if I don't want to see Eunho and Jaeha find their way to happiness, preferably together.

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Lauren Orsini
Rating:

If I had known this story was incest-adjacent, I probably wouldn't have started it in the first place. Sure, these two are not blood-related, but they were raised as brothers and the text never misses an opportunity to remind the reader of that fact. For readers who enjoy a BL age-gap romance with a much younger seme, step brothers turned lovers, angsty missed connections, and a fulfilled childhood marriage proposal, Lover Boy is a perfectly serviceable comic. It just so happens that I like exactly none of these tropes. It has pretty, expressive art and it doesn't skimp on the (censored) sex scenes. It's really a matter of which side of the main stepbrother trope that you fall on.

Eunho has been proposing marriage to Jaeha ever since he could speak. But by the time Eunho was in high school and still confessing his feelings, Jaeha went from laughing it off to telling his little step brother to knock it off. Fast-forward to when Eunho is a 20-year-old college student and Jaeha is a 32-year-old divorcee. The two brothers have reconnected again, and this time Eunho thinks he might actually have a chance. It's too bad Jaeha already has a boyfriend, and one so cruel at that as to make a phone call while he's topping Jaeha so poor Eunho can listen in to how unavailable his big brother is. Even so, Eunho won't take no for an answer. He starts showing up at Jaeha's atelier, where he gives drawing lessons, even though Eunho has no interest in art. Even though it takes these brothers until the end of the comic to ensure that all of their family reunions achieve maximum awkwardness, there are lots of solo and partnered sex scenes throughout—though keep in mind the censorship is of the whited-out dick variety.

When I first discovered BL as a teenager, I was not the slightest bit picky about what flavor of BL it was—I was lucky to find any at all. Now we have BL from Japan, Korea, China, the US, and more, combined with all kinds of topics. BL x idol stories! BL isekai! I'm grateful that today's English-language BL landscape is so expansive that I can be choosy, but it means that even though the art is nice and the localization is faultless, I am choosing not to recommend this one.

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Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. Yen Press, BookWalker Global, and J-Novel Club are subsidiaries of KWE.