By Kou Yaginuma. Released in Japan as “Futatsu no Spica” by Media Factory, serialized in the magazine Comic Flapper. Released in North America by Vertical.

I will admit, most of this volume is pretty much predictable. Remember that shot in Volume 1, where you saw the teacher, filled with good will, come to Asumi’s name and his face became a blank mask? Yeah, if you do, you can likely guess the rest of this volume – the main parts, at least.

Of course, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The author is having the same struggle as his young protagonist. Having started the journey, we now discover how tough it is. After all, if it was easy to be an astronaut, everyone would do it. Luckily, our heroine is made of sturdy stuff. Her childhood jogs give her awesome stamina, and she finds the astrogation fascinating rather than dull as dirt. She’d risk being a bit too perfect were it not for her fragile self-esteem.

I’m not quite sure if the teacher is going to be one of the all-bad variety who gets replaced, or will be one who learns he has wronged everyone through the power of heart and becomes a better person. With this sort of story, it could go either way. Right now, however, he’s clearly in the giant jerk phase, and is not being too subtle about it either. Indeed, several of the other teachers are calling him on why he’s being so gung ho about getting rid of this one student.

Meanwhile, we get more set-up. Clearly Marika has issues, and she’s certainly the most interesting of the supporting cast. As has been noted by a few other reviewers, a lot of this volume reads like a standard school manga, with bullying, grumpy teachers, and overcoming hardships through true grit – just with added SPACESHIPS! However, I trust the author to take us where he’s going at his own pace.

As with Volume 1, about 1/3 of the volume is devoted to short stories with the same cast the author wrote prior to Twin Spica being picked up as a series. They’re not quite as out-of-the-park awesome as the previous volume’s, but they’re both excellent, giving us an idea of exactly how the disaster of 10 years earlier affected not just Asumi but everyone around her. I do hope we see more of Kasane in future volumes.

There’s a bit of a sophomore slump in this volume, but that’s not uncommon with longer works. Much of what we see here is setup, with one big plot gun fired at the end of Chapter 8 to serve as a cliffhanger into Volume 3. Will Asumi be able to overcome everything? Still well worth reading.

By Kou Yaginuma. Released in Japan as “Futatsu no Spica” by Media Factory, serialized in the magazine Comic Flapper. Released in North America by Vertical.

While I was reading this manga, I kept looking for the little things. The big beats, while not exactly bad, were fairly typical. Spunky cute girl with a tragic past and a dream. The sullen blonde who will presumably slowly be won over by our heroine’s relentless niceness. The Hideously Difficult Academy of Culling. Betcha two to one she gets bullied.

This is, however, balanced out by so much that the manga gets right. The little things. The first one I loved was when the cute blond guy with no eyebrows gives her a walnut, telling her she’ll need to build up her hand strength. It’s something that seems like your typical ‘meet cute’ story, and the art does its best to make Asumi look tiny and fragile… but then we see Asumi blithely crush the walnut with only two fingers, barely looking like she’s exerting herself at all. I love hidden depths in my spunky heroines.

Likewise, though at first it seems like a rather cruel way to get rid of 3/4 of your applicants, the test they get is really very clever and practical. Forced cohabitation with perfect strangers, trying to get through a necessary but utterly boring task, dealing with setbacks as things go wrong halfway… welcome to space flight, here’s your rocket. And Asumi gets this right away. Man, I hope she’s not a kid genius in addition to her strength and cute spunkiness. If she is, the bullying will be EPIC.

The other characters are introduced, but the first volume doesn’t really give us much of a sense of them, being primarily devoted to Asumi. They’re the big beats, as I noted. Childhood friend with a crush. Smiling laidback cute guy. Tomboyish girl with glasses. And, of course, the cool loner girl, who is screaming out ‘redeem me!’. I’m pretty sure we’ll see Asumi break her to friendship in future volumes, as one would a wild horse.

The other character who we get more of than merely setup here is Mr. Lion. A mentor isn’t really that unusual in a manga like this. A mentor who’s actually dead is rarer, but still only raises an eyebrow. A ghost mentor with the head of a stuffed lion, though, is impressive. We see him more in the two big short stories that come at the end of this volume (which apparently appeared before the series proper began), and learn that he was an astronaut on the fated Japanese space flight that ended in disaster and killed (eventually) Asumi’s mother. Even he has his cliches (ironically, the volume of Zetsubou-sensei that also came out the week Twin Spica did shows the characters discussing how to have a dramatic death, and mentions the dead man leaving behind a hidden engagement ring), but for a ghost wearing a lion head, he seems very straightforward and practical. I like that in my mentors. (He’s apparently completely written out of the live-action series they made of this. Bah. Japanese TV is not ready for lion-headed ghosts!)

The art can take some getting used to, but once you do, it shows off its moments of real beauty (check out the sequence with Asumi’s mother on the boat, and the 2 pages after that…. just amazing). And Asumi manages to look cute, tiny, and not her real age without appearing to be drawn solely to appeal to loli fetishists, which I appreciate.

I can appreciate why Vertical is putting this out, there’s a lot to get into here. I barely touched on the plot of the space program itself, which ties in with Asumi’s sense of wonder which I anticipate will be the driving factor. The pages that sum up the volume best are at the end of Chapter 4, when we see the three exhausted girls sitting next to their completed domino stacks, right after the testers noted that no one was actually expected to really complete it. But they did it. Beat the odds. Get into space. Never give up.