Avant-garde Yumeko

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Avant-garde Yumeko is about a teenage girl who uses her art to manifest a growing interest in the male body and sex. Whenever she thinks of or sees a dick, she gets the urge to draw! And her work is quite impressive.

This concept could easily be turned into a hentai. Knowing this medium, it probably already has. Oshimi Shuzo is more concerned about the importance of art in the hands of someone who needs a way to channel their curiosity in a private and productive activity. Needless to say, sex is a really hard thing for teenagers (and even adults) to talk about openly - ... many never have any sort of education or "talk" from their parents to prepare them for what their bodies are designed to do. This manga presents a constructive solution to that curiosity that I found to be quite endearing and funny. It's probably relevant that Japan's obscenity laws prohibit depictions of genitals in their media, further limiting the agency of a teenager to learn about sex through the media they consume. Yumeko then has to satiate her curiosity through her own imagination, and with the help of a willing male club member.

That said, there are a lot of drawn dicks in this manga. So I can imagine readers being too grossed out to even care about what themes are being conveyed. It doesn't help that this is an early Shuzo work before his art style became more refined as it is now, making it a bit harder to take seriously and to identify what the point of the story is.

Personally, it didn't bother me enough to take away from the enjoyment of the manga. and I find this to be a good precursor to later works with similar tropes that you may recognize as a fan.

Hello!
Okay, I don't understand much of what I just read, I just think I'll never understand artists... or art... or teenagers.
But to be fair the author ended up making a slightly perverted and stupid manga about penises and self-discovery... in that order and maybe about how art really is a pure expression of the individual and how the sexual arousal of certain individuals can be REALLY weird, even for themselves and looking for the least thoughtful way to explore that issue.
I wouldn't recommend it unless you really want a light, weird, fun read; and find nothing else.

I would describe myself as an "art manga aficionado". I'm an artist, art is 100% of my life. A lot of themes in this manga, I can really connect with on a personal level because of that-- curiosity, passion, excitement, confusion, coming of age, loneliness, using art as a means of exploration and expression, all that good stuff. And I do think that there's nuggets of good stuff in here.

However, I do mostly just find this manga to be disgusting on many different levels. Whenever I see mangaka put their FIFTEEN YEAR OLD characters in situations like these, I just wonder, how much would ... it hurt to make these characters be a more appropriate age? This whole manga is about children being put in sexual scenarios. I find it so disgusting and sometimes even fetishistic. I don't understand why any human being would want to buy this and have it on their shelf.

I tried to imagine an alternate version of this manga where Yumeko is a woman in college, in her 20s. Maybe she's never really felt passionate about anything and is going to school for something she doesn't care about, and she'd never struck an interest in men or their bodies before because she'd always been to busy with her studies & uninterested. But maybe she watches a movie that features people in the nude and that's how she strikes an interest in male bodies, leaving her down the same path as Yumeko in this manga, but with one of her awkward college classmates, instead of a random art club member that she blackmails (which is also disgusting). I think that the story would not only be about the same, but would also be leagues less disgusting to read, on top of having a message of, "Its never too late to switch paths once you discover something you're actually passionate about"-- in Yumeko's case, art.

In conclusion: read Blue Period by Tsubasa Yamaguchi instead if you want to learn about someone become impassioned about art as they come of age.
Or Nude Model by Tsubasa Yamaguchi if you want a story with slightly similar themes but completely different (and, in my opinion, a far more appropriate) execution.