Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Vol. 1

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By Magica Quartet and Hanokage. Released in Japan by Houbunsha, serialized in the magazine Manga Time Kirara Forward. Released in North America by Yen Press.

This is another in a series of media tie-in manga where I have not actually seen the original medium. With Haruhi Suzumiya’s manga I can at least tell you how the manga falls down when compared to the anime and light novels. And Higurashi is the interesting case where most fans agree the manga *is* better than the anime. Madoka Magica, though, is a big phenomenon, one I know through cultural osmosis more than anything else. And while this manga adaptation was perfectly pleasant and didn’t have anything hideously wrong with it (except maybe the usual art style problems), I came away from it with the desire to see the anime and see how it improved on the story. Which, admittedly, may be the reason for many media tie-in adaptations – to get you to seek out the anime/game/novel/toy.

The manga adaptation of this series ran in a seinen magazine for young men, Manga Time Kirara Forward (one of Houbunsha’s many ‘Manga Time’ variations, though unlike most other series that run there Madoka Magica is not a 4-koma). And indeed, despite the cute magical girl plot, young men seems to very much be its target audience. Not that there’s a huge amount of fanservice or adult situations – there isn’t, really. But a lot of this reads like how a male anime fan would want magical girl shows to work. Darker, more weaponized, with a lot less shining optimism. As for me, a person who loves his shining optimism, I’m not sure how I feel about it. Forming a contract to become a magical girl is presented as something you can’t turn back from, and the cliffhanger for this volume fills you with dread rather than inspiring you.

And then there’s Kyubey. As I said, cultural osmosis has led me to know several things about this work without actually seeing it, and Number One With A Bullet was that everyone hates Kyubey. Kyubey looks cute and adorable, like many mascots in similar shows, but his lack of real expression and determination to make magical girls give the whole thing an ominous undertone. Even if I didn’t know about him, I suspect I’d find him creepy.

Our heroine is a bright and shiny optimist in the Usagi mode, and she’s contrasted here with Homura, who is cynical, grumpy, and clearly has a horrific past we don’t know about yet. There’s a yuri fandom associated with this series, and it’s no surprise that these two are a big part of it. Homura is a girl with a mission, and that mission seems to be to stop Madoka becoming a magical girl. Well, so far so good… but with her best friend giving in, I’m not sure how long that’s going to hold up. As for Mami, well, she fills her function. And she does have one of the better lines in the book when she notes that “magical girls don’t always have to be allies”. That line more than anything else shows this is not a shoujo magical girl manga.

As I said at the start, this is pretty solid for the most part. The art is a bit generic (I really couldn’t tell they were designed by Ume Aoki of Sunshine Sketch fame, which I could when I saw the odd anime screencap), but the beats all seem to be there. If you are like me, and can deal with emotional wreckage better on the printed page than on the screen, then this may be the Madoka Magica for you. Anime fans, though, I suspect won’t find much here that’s new.

Alice in the Country of Clover: Bloody Twins

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By Quin Rose and Mamenosuke Fujimaru, based on the game by Quin Rose. Released in Japan as “Clover no Kuni no Alice – Bloody Twins” by Ichijinsha, serialized in the magazine Comic Zero-Sum. Released in North America by Seven Seas.

I never did finish Alice in the Country of Hearts, for obvious reasons. Hopefully that will be remedied later this month by Yen Press. That said, it sold pretty well, so I was not surprised that various spinoffs were licensed. There’s certainly twenty million or so of them coming out in Japan right now. This first volume is complete in one, and focuses on the two cute twins, Tweedledee and Tweedledum. The manga (based on the game once more) posits that Alice did not choose a boyfriend in the “Hearts” game, so instead of a love via “passion” it goes for a love via “friendship.”

Unfortunately, there are a few problems with this approach. First of all, the Dee & Dum story takes up barely half the book, so it’s padded out with a few other short stories based on ‘what if Alice chose xxxxx?’ plotlines. Some of these could be interesting (the Vivaldi plotline in particular), but they’re too short to go anywhere. And since most Western readers will have only read the manga rather than played the game, some seem completely out of left field. Gowland? Really? He was barely in the original manga! The purpose of this is straight up ‘give a nice bone to fans of the game who won’t get to see their path animated’.

As for the main plotline, I was never really a big fan of the twins to begin with, but the main reason to read Alice and enjoy it, at least for me, was that this was a twisted, disturbing variation on an otome game. The reason Alice hadn’t chosen a boyfriend is that they all seemed to be psychotic. You can tell that they’re attempting the same thing here (the twins certainly butcher a lot of people), but whether it’s the different artist or something else the fact is it all comes off as too cute and light-hearted. And Alice falters as well, as requiring her to be in love reduces her to the usual shoujo cliches “he cannot love me the way I love him”, “how can I possibly choose between them”, etc. You know it’s bad when the ancillary character bio describes Ace as ‘more unstable’ in Clover World, but he actually seems genteel by comparison.

This ran in a magazine with a slightly older demographic than the original Hearts manga, and the situations are slightly more adult in nature, though mostly in the way of implication. Throughout the Dee & Dum story, everyone is joking about Alice loving both twins being “tough on a girl’s body”, and the Blood Dupre story has similar implications. It’s not actually too bad, but worth noting given that I think the original manga when released by Tokyopop may have had a younger audience.

There are a large number of sequels/side-stories still to go, but this wasn’t exactly a great place to start. At least it’s only one volume. Hopefully better things will come with Cheshire Cat Waltz, a 3-volume sequel featuring Boris.

Manga the Week of 6/20

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Eep. You may look at what’s coming out next week and think it’s a first week of the month. There is a giant PILE of stuff from several publishers. Let’s break it down.

Dark Horse has the 23rd volume of Gantz. It’s been mentioned that Dark Horse’s manga licenses (Berserk, Gunsmith Cats, Gantz) tend to cater more for the Western Comics sort of fan, and I can sort of see their point. These may not hit any bookstore bestseller lists, but rest assured they do well with Diamond folks.

Kodansha has a few titles that are already out via bookstores but are trickling into Diamond, because Diamond knows the Kodansha buyer is willing to wait those extra weeks. (sarcasm mode off) There’s Volume 19 of Fairy Tail, continuing the long protracted battle against… um… those guys, you know. The latest villains. Also, Jellal. We also have the 3rd volume of the Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex manga, which apparently has an ongoing plot here regarding a serial killer. I think Bloody Monday 6 and Gon 6 are also out, though they vanished from Midtown’s list between 1pm and now. Midtown does this to me sometimes. I think they vanished Mickey Mouse to spite me last week as well.

Viz has their usual slate of non-Jump releases. (Though my shop still has yet to get Toriko and Kamisama Kiss from 2 weeks ago, Bless you, Diamond. Bliamond.) New Arata the Legend and Kekkaishi from Shonen Sunday. New Bokurano and House Of Five Leaves from the diminished but still plugging away Ikki line. New Jormungand from Sunday GX, which is sort of the Shogakukan equivalent to Ultra Jump. And a new Tenjo Tenge omnibus from Ultra Jump, which, well, is sort of a Shueisha version of Sunday GX.

And then there’s Yen’s huge June lineup. No Higurashi, which is taking the summer off (ironically, given it takes place in a June that never ends). But we have tons of other stuff to whet your appetites. As you see, Olympos is coming out. (OK, it’s not on Midtown’s list either, but my store is getting it in.) This is a done-in-one fantasy manga from Ichijinsha’s sorta josei magazine Comic Zero-Sum, and as you can imagine deals with gods and mythology. Two volumes in Japanese, it’s out as an omnibus here. Speaking of omnibuses, remember Alice in the Country of Hearts and its 5 of 6 completed volumes? Well, Yen has rescued it, and is redoing the whole shebang in 3 big omnibuses, including the as-yet-unseen ending volume. I enjoyed this dark and twisted otome game world, and look forward to seeing how it wraps up… or, being a harem game, *if* it wraps up.

Other titles from Yen include the 6th Kobato manga from CLAMP, which I believe is the final one, and which will no doubt be adorable as all get out. Also in the adorable category is Sunshine Sketch 6. I have a soft spot for this 4-koma series, which has gotten some flak for its lack of plot and its even-more-superdeformed-than-usual designs. I do wonder if it will get more readers in this post-Madoka Magica world? In the OEL category, there’s the 2nd volume of James Patterson’s Witch & Wizard, by Nightschool artist Svetlana Chmakova. And lastly, though it’s not Yen, the 7th Haruhi Suzumiya novel is out from their corporate parents. This one is a full complete novel rather than a short story collection, and has enough time-travel to shake a TPDD at. Go get it.