This has quickly become one of my favorite manga, one of my favorite BL (if we want to consider it such, as the first BL ever published) and one of my favorite Moto Hagio's manga. First of all, the art is lovely. It is a very subjective matter but Moto Hagio's 70s art for me is just perfect. She also manages to throw so many emotions on a page that sometimes I just paused to wonder why. There are clues waved into the apparently simple stories and they are not communicated through dialogue, but through art only. There are moments where Juli is shaking, where hefreezes while hearing an event (a fight) and intervenes with far too much anxiousness than expected, and then there is the way his dreams are drawn and the room is presented. This manga has so much.

There are actually multiple plot lines that all revolve around the concept of love and acceptance. There is Thomas, who kills himself in the first page of the manga, and who has been loving Juli for a long time. There is Eric who loves his mother more than anything else in the world and it is then through Juli. There is Oscar, also in love with Juli, a stable sort of love which is also able to take a step aside - but also there is the love for his father and his inability to express love, and how close he goes to losing Juli and his real father because of it. And of course there is Juli, the mystery and center of it all.

At the end of the day, I think Heart of Thomas is almost like a religious parable. Juli takes the role of the sinner who needs to be saved by Jesus's death and Thomas, but later also Eric, become Jesus who dies and sacrifices himself to be able to fully communicate his love and save the sinner. Thomas sacrifices himself to donate Juli his wings (his total, unwavering, almost God-like love) and Eric also offers to give Juli his wings, unsure even what Juli means when he insists he is unlovable, he cannot be loved and he had lost his wings forever.

The truth it, for how I read it, the story is about the trauma of sexual abuse. There is nothing explicit in the manga, we only know that Siegfried seduced Juli and then asked him to come into the room. Juli says he chose Siegfried over Thomas, putting the choice in the context of feelings, love, attractions. Once there the manga tells us that Siegfried and his friends whipped Juli, burnt him, and made him kneel in front of them. Juli's words are something along the lines of "they did everything they wanted with me". Furthermore, the whole manga is full of Juli's shame, self hatred, this conviction that he is tainted, different from others. It really resonated so much. Juli's desire to die and to kill Thomas, because it is impossible that Thomas coule ever love him are at the core of the main interactions between him and Eric.

Truly a haunting manga, but surprisingly it had a bitter sweet happy ending too.