TSF Showcase 2025-04: Change! Sabu

Change Yuri Chenji and Sabu Henmi Into… Yuri Henmi and Sabu Chenji!

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It’s time, once again, to highlight another historic TSF work, venturing all the way back to the 1970s. A decade that I’ve previously discussed across titles like Doron, Boku no Shotaiken [My First Time], Dansei Shikkaku [No Longer Male], and Waratte Yurushite [Laugh it Off]. Treasures of the early genre that would be left inaccessible and unknown if not for the diligent effort of TSF manga historian and translator, Charishal.

This past month, Chari reached back through the databases and released an English translation of not only another forgotten 1970s TSF comic, but one from one of the most prolific manga artists of the era. The legendary Go Nagai, creator of influential works like Devilman, Mazinger Z, Cutie Honey, and easily enough cool stuff to fill a museum exhibit, maybe even three. You’d think that someone like him would have all his works be chronicled and preserved, released in big prestigious collections, but the world of preservation is not a just one.

No matter how big a creator is, there is always a chance of works they spent weeks or months or even years on just falling by the wayside. And that’s frankly terrifying! Fortunately, there are passionate people like Chari, doing what they can to keep manga history, and niche genre history, alive for those who want to learn it.

Released as a one-off back in 1976, Change! Sabu falls into a similar mold as many of the other 70s TSF comics I’ve talked about, being a comical affair involving a pair of high schoolers, and another body swap romp, this one featuring a now familiar dynamic. Yuri Chenji is a boyish girl who wishes she was stronger, taller, and able to compete with men, viewing her culturally mandated femininity as a burden.

While Sabu Henmi is an effeminate boy, passive beyond the occasional prank, and generally more interested in ‘feminine’ hobbies like cooking and gymnastics. Oh, and they’re next door neighbors, just to cinch things. You might think you have an idea how things go based on that description alone, but this is the primordial era, where the rules of structure for everything were a lot looser than they are today.

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TSF Showcase 2025-04
Change! Sabu by Go Nagai

Opening on a naked girl checking herself out in the mirror— ‘cos you gotta sell books somehow— we are introduced to the main characters. With Yuri bemoaning how she is a girl with such a feminine form as she tries doing muscleman poses and jump kicks. Positively wistful the days when she was the tallest and strongest person in class before puberty stole that from her. Meanwhile, Sabu confides in his single father who… has a Hitler mustache. Ugh. I know there has to be some cultural-historical reason for that, but how does this keep coming up? At least it’s better than just having a character who’s the spitting image of Hitler, like in the two Hikaru Yuzuki stories I’ve covered.

Anyway, Sabu’s father is an uncaring divorcee who is clearly disappointed by his son’s ‘sensitivities’ and is probably meant to be a reflection of men of his era. Cold, uncaring, and distant to his one and only son. Saying that he neither loves nor hates Sabu, and cannot tolerate seeing his son act so weak and womanly. Rather than trying to know his son more or try to understand why he is acting the way he is, he just pushes him away— literally— and shivers at the thought of being around him.

Despite how impaired their relationship has become, Sabu still cares for his father, making him a boxed lunch the following morning, before pulling a trick from the housewife’s playbook. Refusing to give him a lunch without a kiss… only to use this opportunity to shove a cockroach in his father’s mouth. I know this is meant to be playful, but that’s just a deranged and cruel thing to do to another person. That cockroach was probably filthy, and now it’s crawling around in a man’s stomach, where it will probably live for another 30 hours.

Afterward, Sabu and Yuri decide to go to school together, but in order to prevent any teasing from the other, both force themselves to speak more masculine or feminine respectively. It’s a cute detail that shows both protagonist forcing themselves to act against their nature. Repressing their true self to avoid ostracization and criticism from those around them. It’s a concept that is probably familiar to most queer folks. (Not me though, I just used my femme voice exclusively after realizing I was trans.) However, this guise quickly gets sidetracked by foreshadowing the main conflict of the story, a gang of school hooligans by the name of Innendan, or Shadow Gang, who patrol the streets, looking for their next victim.

Sabu wants to avoid them and avoid getting hurt in the process. While Yuri is far more outspoken, believing that those with strength should use it to beat up anybody who’s causing trouble, voicing how she could do something about this if she were a man. A frustration that she echoes during physical education later in the day, where she is huffing about after being rejected from the men’s sports class before, unintentionally, wandering into the boy’s locker room to shower. Sabu, conveniently, wanders in at the same time, frustrated by how violent sports are, and he gets a face full of naked Yuri, legs outstretched, as she felt like doing some shower stretches. Because that’s more fun to draw than just someone standing around.

Humiliated, Yuri rushes out of the showers and crashes into a dazed Sabu. The two bonk heads, crash onto the tile floor— which would probably cause a concussion— and through the power of the cosmos, the two wind up switching bodies. Yuri is the first to wake up in Sabu’s body, and assumes that she must be a ghost looking over her body, musing about how young she was and how people will mock her for dying in such an embarrassing manner. I believe this line is meant to be a parody of an established trope common in its era.

However, the humor does not land as much as intended, nor does this sorrowful reaction really match Yuri’s personality as an outspoken and hotblooded person. Yuri is established as a “girl who would have preferred being a boy” and here she is, acting in a stereotypically feminine manner, crying and worrying about how small her breasts were. It just is not true to her, admittedly basic, character.

After hearing Yuri cry for a bit, Sabu wakes up, the two have their obligatory mirror scene— with a giant ten-person mirror— and both realize what happened. That they swapped body from the collision— or rather “shock.” Yuri is fascinated by this, Sabu is embarrassed and panicky, and with the boys slated to storm the locker room soon, they decide to try bonking bodies again. And… it works! Yes, in a move that defies norms that had yet to be established, the two can repeatedly collide to swap bodies, and do so without limitations.

I do not know if this was the first example of body swapping by collision— or bonking heads. It probably wasn’t if I were to guess based on experience and intuition. But this is early enough in the genre development timeline, and from such a well-known creator, that I think it would at least be a noteworthy influence. Though, definitely not as much as Tenkōsei). (Seriously, if you have not watched Tenkōsei, and like body swaps, you really ought to check it out. It’s historically vital!)

After getting dressed, the two escape from the locker room and reflect on the experience positively, musing about how their respective bodies may actually be better fits, and that they should try this again. Rather than explore that end of their relationship and turn into a mutual long-term body swap scenario, we finally get introduced to the Innendan, and they are something else.

As you have seen from the images strewn between every second paragraph, Change! Sabu is from an era before the contemporary anime aesthetic had been solidified. Back when there were still a lot of heavy inspirations from western comics and classic cartoons. It’s a love it or hate it sort of thing amongst anime aesthetic enthusiasts— I personally love it— as it allows for a vast level of expression, and at times more variety in how characters are designed. This was illustrated with the manic expressions of Sabu’s father earlier in this comic, but we reach another level when the Innendan.

Just look at these teenage boys. Look at how exaggerated every feature is and how none of them look like they really belong together, let alone with Sabu and Yuri. Look at how overtly masculine they are, and how the leader of the gang basically looks like a shaved gorilla. Look at their torn up Jotaro-Kujo-looking-ass torn hats and uniforms, all paired with a T-shirt with their gang name on it, where they cut off the collar with a pair of scissors. All while smoking up a storm because this was the 70s! Cigarettes were a daily part of the typical adult diet. These men have effectively nothing to do with the TSF element of the story, but sometimes to make a good TSF story, you need to look beyond genre and admire the totality of the work.

Going back to the story, Yuri attracts the ire of the Innendan after she steps on the leader’s hat and provokes them, because she’s that kind of gal. Sabu is terrified as she tries to stand up to people literally two times her size, and the two get roped into a chase sequence that concludes with the Innendan running into a teacher… and they beat him half to death. Nobody stops them, nobody seemingly cares, they express zero remorse, and I have to wonder where the hell the cops in this world are. Because this is just assault on government property.

Following this chase, Sabu and Yuri discuss their newfound beef with the Innendan, and conclude that the only way out of this predicament is to get into a battle. Except Yuri is too small and weak to have any chance, and despite being tall, Sabu is Sabu, and couldn’t kick a rabbit if his life depended on it. Yuri tries to egg him on, promising to help him with this fight, but as she places her faith in him, he just passes out.

This is followed by an impressive dream sequence. The imagery is striking and evocative, the use of shading is excellent, and the ability to deviate from the ordinary world gives him the opportunity for some gorgeous composition. The stark whites of the first panels as colors are inverted to show Yuri’s rage, before she delves into a pool of water, her stance growing weak and vulnerable as she wraps her arms over herself. The Innendan are reimagined as (more) monstrous creatures, leering shadows who encroach her all at once.

With no defense, no way to escape, Yuri channels her inner strength, clenching her muscles before her body transforms, developing the chest and physique of a strong man, and she uses this newfound strength to smash these thugs. It’s rare that I get to see such a clear trans-masculine fantasy like that, and I never would have expected to see something like this from a comic of this sort. Frankly, I wish modern TSF were more willing to display this type of power fantasy.

Inspired by her dream, Yuri realizes that she has an obvious solution to her woes. If she physically lacks the strength she desires, and lacks the constitution to develop it, she could just steal Sabu’s body and make him buff as hell. So she hops across the trees, strips herself and Sabu, before bonking their bodies together to swap ’em. …Though, before doing so, Yuri pauses to remark on how this act is causing her heart to beat like crazy. I think the 70s understanding of this scene is that she is doing something that involves a naked man and, as a woman, she is naturally frazzled by this. But after that dream of hers, and sifting through TSF gulags for so long, I think she’s just aroused about the idea of embodying a big, strong man.

This scene also warrants a slight artistic criticism, as Sabu’s is presented as jacked when shirtless. With defined pecs, bulging biceps, and abs. I can understand why Nagai drew him that way. Because this story is built around the idea of a girl taking a boy’s body to become strong. So the boy should look physically imposing and then look like a certified muscle-man near the end. However, if Yuri is going to train up Sabu’s body, and Sabu is a very passive person, shouldn’t he have a more slender, weaker build. Because no man looks this hot by skipping out on PE class.

While Yuri in Sabu proceeds to get jacked by… running down the street while barefoot, Sabu in Yuri is woken up by his drunken father, who is shocked to see that his only son has magically turned into a girl. It’s a fun little gag at the expense of the father, but Sabu wakes up during this, he completely fails to notice that he is in Yuri’s body. He talks, stands up, probably feels the breeze over his bare boobs, and wraps himself in his sheets. I’ve seen dozens upon dozens of TF stories where the protagonist has a similar reaction, but this one just feels particularly absurd. Maybe that’s just a side effect of this body swap, where the participants cannot understand that they swapped bodies until they are made aware of it by someone or something else. Which isn’t a bad idea for a story, but I doubt that was the intention.

Come sunrise, Yuri is done with her night of training, and makes plans to keep this up every day for a month. Steal Sabu’s body, work it to the bone, and let him deal with the rest and recovery until his form is honed to the peak of masculinity. That’s not really how exercise works, but whatever. She then goes to swap back with her original body, and winds up gawking at her original form, finding it to be “sexy.” In fact, it is so enticing that she starts smooching her nipples, spurring on an unwanted erection that… she does not understand. Seriously girl, you went running for hours with a dick wagging between your legs and didn’t feel it getting hard even once?

This scene is meant to parallel how Yuri looked over Sabu’s body last night, and once again I look at it in several ways. The 70s understanding that Yuri is taking on the role and body of a man, so she is being pressured by her body to have a ‘natural male reaction.’ My TSF aficionado interpretation that Yuri is so enamored with the idea of being a guy and all that entails. Including being the ‘man’ in sexual situations, even if they involve her original body. And the queer perspective that Yuri, despite her sheepish behavior around naked men, is just attracted to women. When body swapping is involved, the question of ‘do I want to be with them, or do I want to be them’ gets a helluva lot more complicated than it does for real life queer relationships.

After doing… something that makes mister sun all smiles, Sabu’s father walks in on his son, back in his original body, and starts kicking him awake. Sabu, rather than just get up and be exhausted, is left screaming, his entire body burning with pain from Yuri’s 6 to 8 hour training session. Meanwhile, Yuri, mentally exhausted from all the training, proceeds to spend all day sleeping, waking up only to eat meals and to snag Sabu’s body every night.

This makes up the structure of these two’s lives for the next month. Yuri is a covert body thief who works Sabu’s body to the bone every day. Sabu is left just lying around in pain, or sleeping in a girls’ body, doing pretty much nothing with his life. It’s a dynamic that… has some reason to it, but is not logic.

Change! Sabu is playing around with the idea of fatigue is something that lingers in both the mind and the body, and the harder one works, the more time must be spent recovering. Even though Yuri in Sabu only works the body she is in, and mentally does nothing strenuous, she carries this mental fatigue when bonking back to her own body. While Sabu’s body is plagued by muscle aches because that’s what happens when one works out for six hours a day without a good maintenance program. Sabu’s fatigue makes sense. Yuri’s fatigue is mostly just an excuse for her to not go to school for a month so the two can return to school together. Also, Sabu never realizes what Yuri was doing by stealing his body, and just thinks his body got strong through the power of sudden muscle cramps. He’s an airhead like that.

At school, they are swiftly introduced to a new teacher, a twenty-something woman named Yurii Matsumoto. (I think her name is meant to be a play on Yuri’s name, but the humor was lost in translation.) Sabu is immediately smitten with her, muttering “gosh, I kind of wish that were me…” in a move that really lends credence to the interpretation that these two are just a pair of trans teens. But before the two can break apart what Sabu just said, they are finally greeted by the Innendan again, walking in late and accosting Miss Matsumoto.

Matsumoto’s a newbie, so she does not know how to react to some rowdy semi-human punks smoking and drinking in her classroom. So they march forward, going up to the teacher’s podium as they sexually harass her, only stopping when Yuri threatens them, challenging them to a fight against her and Sabu. They laugh at her challenge, but accept it, scheduling a battle after school. Having already duped Sabu into this fight, Yuri hatches her plan. Explaining that with her fighting spirit and his body, she can demolish these creeps, and though Sabu is scared, he ultimately agrees to swap with her again. …Only for the comic to then spend 15 pages on locker room naked antics before actually initiating the swap.

This is something that I completely understand, but don’t really enjoy. Nagai was ultimately creating this story as a sex comedy action affair, and wanted to throw in some erotic tension leading up to the ultimate battle and resolution. So he wrote this long sequence of a boy and girl, both too timid to let the other see their naked bodies, getting flustered as they engage in this tangentially erotic activity. Yuri knows that she should not be so shy about this, after stripping Sabu every night for a month, yet she still struggles under pressure. She does not want him to see her naked body, and he does not want her to see his naked body. So Yuri blindfolds Sabu, teases him in a move that had to be a sexual awakening for someone, and after a few failures, they successfully bonks heads.

With the strength she so desired at her disposal, Yuri in Sabu plays the role of a chivalrous hero and is led by the Innendan to their battlegrounds. The outskirts of a construction site. Not the actual construction site though, because that would be too cool. Despite not having gotten into a real fight in presumably years, Yuri is as cocky as can be, and swiftly begins whooping some Innendan ass. Kicking them to the ground, tackling them before they can pounce her, and smacking them with her fists when they come asking for me. It’s all good action, showing Nagai’s proficiency even this early in his career, with strikes that flow nearly from panel to panel and enough smudging and motion lines to make things feel dynamic without overwhelming the art underneath.

Eventually, only the head of the Innendan is left standing, and he’s looking for blood, channeling all the power he can and turning into a demonic figure as he rushes toward Yuri. His rage and power allow him to grab Yuri by the head, tossing her into a concrete wall before kicking around her defenseless body. With her face gushing with blood, the leader grabs a football-sized rock and aims to bust Yuri’s head open, only for Sabu to come in with a distraction, flashing his pussy at this gorilla-like brute.

This gives Yuri the time needed to get up, snatch the rock from the leader, and just pulverize his ass. Smacking his face open, breaking every bone in his left foot, shattering his balls, and finally smacking the rock into his mouth, breaking all of his teeth. All rendered through this elegant mixture of early 20th century western cartoon hyperviolence and a willingness to show the true bloody pain of each blow.

This, somehow, does not kill the Innendan leader, but it does leave Yuri satisfied and Sabu relieved that she, and his original body, are both safe. The Innendan are left too battered to ever hurt them again, and the duo return to their bodies off-screen, where the story ends on a comedic note. With Yuri asking to switch bodies with Sabu so he can take a test for her, only for him to run away. A decent final joke for a body swap story, though one that does not quite capture or build upon the characters this comic has fostered. As I have been noting throughout this showcase, Sabu and Yuri are two characters who are repeatedly stated to be pretty ideal candidates for a long-term or even permanent body swap. It’s obvious from the premise. And the story reinforces this idea with its ending.

Yuri just won a fight against several well-known delinquents and, in a sense, proved her masculinity by becoming a ‘man among men.’ Sabu lacks such an affirmation, though him choosing to flash his female body parts could be seen as him embracing what he has access to, using it as a tool that he previously lacked, and one that can protect others. …Though, that’s quite a stretch. Screw it, I’ll go back to how Sabu pulled a ‘god, I wish that were me’ when looking at a pretty young woman. Both of these characters seem pretty dang trans in my modern perspective, half a century removed from when this work originally released, so having their story end on this farcical note is on, some level, unsatisfying.

However, as I said previously, the goal here is primarily to serve as a ‘sex comedy action affair’, and I would say it handily succeeds on all three of those fronts. There is a surprising amount of sexual content for what I’d imagine was a book made for a more general audience, and it can get pretty kinky at points. Though, that’s not a surprise. I read Nagai’s original run of Cutie Honey while working on this showcase, and it’s chock full of fetishes. (And it’s also DOPE!) The comedy, while not all of it hits, is consistently enjoyable through its art, exaggeration, and absurdity. And there is a good amount of violence and action. Enough for it to be consistently present and satisfying, but not distract from the other elements.

Then comes gauging this work as a TSF story. As I said at the start, I think it was a likely influence on a number of other creators who tackled the concept in their own way, and it is interesting in how similar and different it is from more contemporary works. The diametrically opposed boy and girl protagonists. The fact that the girl is effectively the main protagonist, leading the charge and mostly just using the boy for his body. How the two protagonists are pretty much ideal for a body swap scenario, rather than ordinary people thrown into an extraordinary scenario. The fact that the swap trigger is naked body bonking, rather than vanilla head bonking. And how unabashedly horny, just not in a way I’m used to.

My only criticisms with its approach are some strange contrivances and, of course, a lack of exploration. But that’s okay. It knew when to stop and recognized the value in leaving the door open for other creators to iterate, and, well, we have almost 50 years of iteration at this point.

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…Ah beans, that’s only 4,000 words, and I promised to deliver at least 5,000 words of TSF Showcase every month this year. I could weasel my way out of this, saying I’ve already delivered 30,000 words so far this year, but I guess I owe you folks another one, so… you get two TSF Tuesdays this month! We’re going from Change! Sabu to… Change!