By Quin Rose, Owl Shinotsuki and Delico Psyche, based on the game by Quin Rose. Released in Japan as “Heart no Kuni no Alice ~My Fanatic Rabbit~” by Mag Garden, serialized in the magazine Comic Blade Avarus. Released in North America by Yen Press.

Well this has certainly turned into a franchise, hasn’t it? Given sales in North America seem to be relatively strong (for manga), we shouldn’t be surprised. Yet here is the third spinoff series from the original Alice manga, with promises of a fourth this spring and two more in the summer. Each focusing on a different pairing for our heroine, in the finest otome game tradition. And each managing to also deal with the main serious game plotline, where your secondary goal is to figure out that Alice actually regaining her memories is BAD BAD BAD. And with one exception (sorry, Bloody Twins, you still suck), the spinoff manga have done an impressive job of doing just that.

Not that you would know it from the first half. And I try not to begrudge the series its romance – after all, that *is* the other half of the goal of the games, and its primary audience is women who like to see hot guys of various types (all psychotic, but in different ways!) fall for our stand-in-for-the-reader heroine. This time around, it’s Elliot March, aka the march Hare, who is Blood Dupre’s #2 at the Hatter Mansion. As with the rest of the cast, Elliot is drawn to Alice being different (her ‘outsider’ status) and both he and Alice starting to fall for each other while simultaneously not knowing what that is. You know the drill – “what is this strange pain in my chest”, etc.

Things start to change as we are reminded that the hatter clan is a mafia organization – and that Wonderland has a very casual, even callous view of death, given that it’s impermanent (well, relatively). Alice has been trying to distance herself from the fact that she’s living with a bunch of killers, so Blood (deliberately, I suspect) makes absolutely sure that she gets this shoved in her face, and knows that Elliot is a trained killer as well.

Then comes the part of the book that really knocks it out of the park. For all that Alice is the heroine in Wonderland to whom all the guys are attracted, she has amazingly low self-esteem, constantly living in the shadow of her perfect big sister (whose fate, again, is alluded to but never specified by the other men in the cast) and having to be around Blood, who physically resembles her old boyfriend/crush/whichever. Elliot notices that Alice gets depressed every time this comes up, and offers a solution. And once again, the manga (and no doubt the games) remind you that it’s not just a case of picking a hot guy and living sexily ever after – these people are SCREWED UP. Wonderland is a world of twisted values about death and what it means to be alive, and they’re not attracted to Alice’s personality or beauty – they’re attracted to Alice as she has a beating heart rather than a clock.

After this, the rest of the manga isn’t quite as interesting – it doesn’t help that Peter shows up, and is in ‘obsessive’ mode. It does end on a good cliffhanger, though, with Vivaldi calling for Alice’s head even as Elliot races to the Hatter Mansion to save her. There’s only two volumes in the series, so everything will wrap up nicely next time, I imagine. But this series continues to show how to make a really interesting romance series – having you constantly question everything about the heroes, heroine, world, and premise. Nice job.

By Quin Rose and Mamenosuke Fujimaru, based on the game by Quin Rose. Released in Japan as “Clover no Kuni no Alice – Cheshire Neko to Waltz” by Ichijinsha. Released in North America by Seven Seas.

I was less than impressed with the first spinoff from the Alice books, Bloody Twins. This second one promises a much longer and more involved plotline – it’s 7+ volumes in Japan – and like the heart volumes has Alice bonding with a lot of people while clearly being romantically paired off with only one of them. Here it’s Boris, the Cheshire Cat of Alice’s dream world.

The premise, supposedly, of the ‘Clover’ world is that the player, playing Alice, did not actually pick anyone while playing the ‘Hearts’ game – which involved a love based on passion. So the world changes to the ‘Clover’ country, where Alice once again interacts with most of the cast she knows (Julius is gone, and I missed him), along with a few new characters, and tries to see if she can find a love based on ‘companionship’. The manga thus fairly unapologetically plots out one of the ‘routes’ you can take as Alice in the game.

What this means in terms of an actual manga plotline is that Alice is uprooted from her comfortable life at the amusement park (as I said, different world from the Hearts manga) and dumped into a lonely forest. Much of this first volume involves her fear and uncertainty at having her life turned upside down right after she decided to stay there and not return home to her sister. Luckily, she eventually finds Boris, and through a series of wacky situations, ends up staying at the Hatter’s place and getting a new job.

Like Bloody Twins, this manga is focused far more on the romance than the Hearts manga. Alice’s sister is mentioned once or twice, but the implication we get at the end of Hearts is never brought up. Instead, we get the Hatter, and the Twins, and above all Boris, all trying to get into Alice’s pants. I’d mentioned in Bloody Twins that there was a far more sexually suggestive air to the book, and that continues here – at one point the Hatter says ‘So maybe you’ll *stay* if I make you *come*’ and his implication is clear. Of course, this manga series – and the original games – were written for female fans, not male ones. As a result, the tendency to try to keep all the harem characters virgins so as not to offend male otaku is absent. Nothing actually happens here, but I would not be terribly surprised if Alice and Boris come together – so to speak – in the future.

This volume does tend to get a little aimless at times, and risks being as light and frothy as Bloody Twins was. The good thing, though, is that it’s not afraid to show how emotionally damaged all its cast is. Alice and Boris are both filled with doubts and unfulfilled needs, and can’t communicate well at all – part of Alice’s worries are that Boris doesn’t love her as much because he’s a cat deep down. Meanwhile, thankfully Peter White and Ace are both in this universe as well, and they’re as insane as ever – Peter is the worst stalker ever, and Ace always seems to be one step away from a mass murder spree. If the title can balance its romantic comedy elements with the discomfort at its heart, it should prove just as fun as the original.

By Quin Rose and Soumei Hoshino, based on the game by Quin Rose. Released in Japan as “Heart no Kuni no Alice ~Wonderful Wonder World~” by Mag Garden, serialized in the magazine Comic Blade Avarus. Released in North America by Yen Press.

I have a sad confession to make. You see… I forgot to spoil myself for the end of this manga. I know, it sounds unusual. After all, you are my faithful readers, and know me well. You know that I traditionally spoil myself rotten. And indeed, later on in this review I will be discussing ‘the big spoiler’, be warned. But when Tokyopop released Vol. 5 of this series, they hadn’t yet gone under, and there wasn’t as big a need to find out what was going on. Afterwards, well, I just forgot to. What this means, though, is that for once I came at an ending with no idea what would happen, and thus managed to be both surprised and pleased. Which is especially surprising given the ending’s hardly happy…

In a previous review of this series, I had noted that what I enjoyed most about it was that all of Alice’s choices for her ‘reverse harem’ were so broken. And even though there was a good deal of ‘and she changes them with her pure heart and friendship’ to it – this is still an adaptation of an otome game, after all – many of them stayed pleasantly psychotic and bloodthirsty anyway. Indeed, Ace was probably my favorite character, as he recognizes and is actively fighting against what Alice represents. There’s also some good backstory given throughout, especially regarding Blood Dupre, Vivaldi, and Eliot March. You get the sense that life actually happened before Alice arrived, which is hard to achieve in a setting like this.

I understand, having spoiled myself NOW, that fans of the games were a little annoyed at the opaqueness of the manga, especially towards the end. There’s apparently a whole lot left out about the nature of Peter White, etc. (Which doesn’t seem to bother me as much, mostly as I loathe Peter White. The manga apparently turned up the ‘jerk’ level on several characters, and he was the worst of them.) This is the nature of such adaptation, though, and I recall Higurashi fans being similarly annoyed with the anime. The question is whether one can get a gleaning of what actually happened from what the manga writer givens us. And I think the answer is yes, though it’s only a gleaning. (Apparently the manga writer didn’t understand the game’s ending.)

Here’s where I talk spoilers, by the way.

We’ve had Alice in Wonderland for most of the manga series, but occasionally she gets these pangs of conscience that she really should “wake up” and return to the real world, as her big sister is waiting for her. And as she interacts with the others, the vial she was given at the start fills up with liquid. When it’s full, she can return. And so she does, despite some misgivings, and others telling her not to, and those strange headaches she gets sometimes. And when she returns, she finds… well, actually, she doesn’t. Blood Dupre goes screaming off grumpily into the ‘real world’ after her and forces her to return. Having gotten approval to do this by Nightmare, who can now ‘Seal Off’ Alice’s memories again. And then we see her older sister in a coffin.

And suddenly the entire premise is thrown on its ear. Suddenly instead of ‘a teenage girl lands in a magical fantasy land where she must decide which hot guy she likes best’, it would seem that the land itself is attempting to prevent Alice from sinking into what is presumably hopeless despair in the real world, and that her sitting with her sister having tea and talking books is actually the dream. And that the vial which fills up as Alice interacts with the others is likely to be filling with ALICE’S feelings, not the guys falling for her. And we see why she gets so upset when all the others in Wonderland keep trying to murder each other (well, besides the usual reason anyone would).

So what we have here is a bunch of sociopathic clockwork people attempting to rise above their station and change themselves, even though that is completely impossible, and also help to heal the heart of a broken and damaged young woman devastated at a death in the family by sealing off her memory and keeping her in a fantasy world filled with blood and chaos. And that’s fantastic. Discomfiting, but fantastic. In short, this manga is more for Higurashi fans than for, say, Ouran fans. Highly recommended, and re-reading all 3 omnibuses in one stroke definitely helps as well.