Boys Being Boys: Doki Doki Romance Escape by Joli Hamada

Boys Being Boys: Doki Doki Romance Escape is an 18-pg mini comic I made in March of 2024, for a comics collective called UTOT Komiks. This story follows two high school boys, Riku and Naoki, hanging out after school, where they boot up a dating simulation game to play on a library computer. Suddenly, Riku gets sucked into the dating game as the female protagonist (that they earlier mistakenly thought they got to romance), and along with Naoki’s help from outside in the real world, the two must navigate dating other high school boy characters in order for Riku to escape the game! This story is comedic, silly, and seriously unserious, and references tropes commonly found in comedy/gag manga and asian dating sim culture. This particular mini comic was made for a larger anthology project for the UTOT Komiks collective, centered around the theme of high school.