Witch Hat Atelier 13

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 13

by Kamome Shirahama
translated by Stephen Kohler

Kodansha

2025

 

 

In Witch Hat Atelier 13, the annual Silver Eye Festival is still besieged by a monstrous leech that appears like a circulatory system, lowering over the fairgrounds like a cage. But in the previous volume, master witch Qifrey was able to defeat the disgraced former magical ambassador who created the monster, and most of the festival-goers have been evacuated to a safe distance. There's still great danger, but some of the most urgent issues have been addressed.
 
Coco was injured by the leeches, so Qifrey has brought her to the royal Healing Tower to receive medical attention. Master Beldaruit, Qifrey's old teacher and one of the three highest ranked witches, is there too. He creates a portable illusion of Coco, looking like a tiny little fairy with her face, to fly alongside Qifrey as he searches the evacuated capital city for Custas, the injured boy who learned forbidden magic in order to save his father.
 
Of all the things you might do with magic that are forbidden by the Pact, healing is by far the most tempting to try and the most difficult to understand restriction. The witches who use forbidden magic have used that possibility to draw in Custas, and may be trying to appeal to Coco along the same line. (Though Coco and her friend Tartah have both realized this on their own anyway, and are actively questioning why healing is forbidden, and if they might be willing to break the Pact to try it.) 
 
The forbidden witches hope that once someone tries one form of forbidden magic, they'll readily throw out all the rules and try the others too (and the Knights Moralis, who enforce the Pact, fear the same), but I wonder if the slope is really so slippery.
 
The Knights Moralis routinely use the one form of magic that directly affects people's bodies that the Pact allows - magic to erase memories. This lets them keep the secrets the Pact requires. Non-witches who learn how magic works can be made to forget it; witches who use forbidden spells can forget how to cast them. I suppose these spells are only allowed when they're defending the Pact, that you can't just erase someone's memory for your personal benefit and have it be okay, but there's an obvious contradiction here. Memory erasure is a much worse thing to do to somebody than healing them, and it does affect their body, so that the usual objection to healing sounds silly in this context.
 
That contradiction comes to a crisis point in this volume, because when Qifrey finds Custas, he's used more counterclock tattoos to save dozens of people from the poorest neighborhood from their injuries. Draw a counterclock spell on a shattered water jug, and its existence will rewind to a time before it broke, giving you a chance to pour the water into another container, or set down a cloth to catch the fragments, before it catches up to itself and shatters again, exactly as before. Draw it on an injured person and their body AND MIND will return to an earlier time before they were hurt. Custas saved his dying father and has kept him in a kind of half-life for weeks by drawing and redrawing the tattoo each day. For his father, it is perpetually the day before he died - he has no memory of being hurt, or anything else that's happened since then. He doesn't know and can't understand that his son is using forbidden magic.
 
While this is happening, the royal prince meets Riceh's timid older brother. (This is our first time meeting him too.) We learn that he was physically abused by a cruel teacher, who also tried to crush Riceh's creative spirit, which is why she reacts so badly against any compulsory or rote parts of her education. Shirahama has shown us over and over how bad teachers can basically destroy the students trusted to them. With the brother's help, the prince finds Riceh, Tetia, and Agott, and they use Tetia's sand-tents to provide temporary shelter to all the evacuees. We also briefly meet Agott's mother, who is pleased to see her daughter looking happy to be helping people in need.

Tower Dungeon 3

 
Tower Dungeon 3

by Tustomu Nihei

translated by Sam Malissa
Kodansha

2025
 
  

The previous volume of Tower Dungeon ended on a cliffhanger, with a party of rival adventurers ambushing our heroes. In the brief, losing fight, Yuva (our audience viewpoint character) got knocked off a ledge, guaranteeing a 10 meter fall and a hard landing on the stone floor of the story below.

 

The whole mission had been a mess from the start. The Necromancer killed the king and kidnapped the princess, caused the legendary Dragon Tower to reappear, and took his hostage up to level 100, a kilometer above the base. The titular tower dungeon is big like a mountain, with a perfectly circular base, flawless construction, an impossible height and size. The royal guard sent to save her was massacred by the tower's perils, and the survivors were recalled by parliament, who wanted the royal-blooded guard to sit as a place-holder on the throne until the princess could be returned. 

 

Master archer Enriqo, fire magician Lilisen, and the recently conscripted Yuva were the only official rescuers left. A boom town sprung up outside the dungeon as ambitious adventurers sought to make their fortune by pillaging the tower. But the ambush wasn't just treasure hunters - they were a handful of former royal guards, now mercenaries, sent by an unknown rival member of the royal family to prevent the princess's rescue.

 

Now Tower Dungeon volume 3 opens with super-strong Yuva proving himself much hardier than anyone suspected. Until now, he's only used his strength to carry heavy supplies, and he's seemed to get hurt as easy as anyone. But he survived the fall, and we watch him scale the stone-block wall, endure several arrows, and overpower the mercenaries to save his friends. The trio seem bonded by the experience. Enriqo reveals something the mercenaries wanted - a magic arrowhead given to him by the departing guard captain, which should be able to slay the undead dragon on level 80. Lilisen was initially pretty dismissive of Yuva, but her feelings are warming rapidly.

 

Fearing there might be more mercenaries waiting back in town, they decide to push on despite their injuries. They find the all-girl adventurer gang the Excavators have been turned to stone by a basilisk, depicted here as a giant moth with eye spots on its wings. Yuva is turned to stone too, but Lilisen and Enriqo manage to slay the monster, returning everyone to normal. A goth gal from the gang kind of flings herself at Yuva which makes Lilisen visibly jealous. I think she likes him likes him. Later, she gives him a magic ring so they can hear each other's thoughts. The poor guy is so naive and innocent, but his thoughts reveal he likes her too.

  

The final chapter of this volume opens up the narrative a bit more. In his sleep, Yuva dreams of the kidnapped princess. It seems she's made a kind of psychic contact with him. Members of the royal family all have dragon blood, they live supernaturally long lives and some can transform into dragons. Lilisen's magic might be a draconic power too. The princess warns Yuva that the necromancer is trying to merge his consciousness with the zombie dragon, and that Bad Things will happen if he succeeds. When Yuva awakes and tells the others, Enriqo realizes something Yuva (raised by his grandparents in a tiny rural village) never guessed about himself - he's part of the royal family, and his super strength comes from his dragon blood.
 
Nihei continues to show us unusual takes on classic fantasy creatures. The basilisk moth is both imposing and different from any interpretation I've seen before. Up to now, interactions between Yuva and Enriqo have been a bit stiff and formal; between Yuva and Lilisen almost cartoony in their sibling-like antagonism. As the three become closer as a result of their shared experiences, their interactions also become friendlier and more genuine, with the barriers imposed by rank or rivalry coming down to allow more honest exchanges.

Witch Hat Atelier 12

 
Witch Hat Atelier 12

by Kamome Shirahama
translated by Stephen Kohler

Kodansha

2024

 

  

The previous several volumes of Witch Hat Atelier set up all the pieces of a comprehensive disaster. Now they've been set in motion, and everything's in chaos. The girls have traveled to the annual Silver Eve festival, attended by witches from all over the countryside and by even more onlookers. The festival is a chance for witches to show off their newest spells and compete for royal patronage, and for the public to enjoy the spectacle. 

 

The king is there, ready to meet with the most promising inventors, publicly affirming the agreement about witches' role in society, while privately studying old forbidden healing magic. The Pact, you see, says that spells should only be cast on objects (never on people), prevents ordinary people from knowing the truth about magic, and bans witches from learning anything about first aid or medicine. The Knights Moralis enforce the Pact by erasing the memory of anyone who violates it (the only spell they allow to be cast directly on a person). So the king's secret is a serious breach of the law!

 

Coco and Tartah have started realizing they have feelings for each other. They also have serious doubts about the Pact. It's not just that Coco fears that saving her mother (who's been turned to stone) might require forbidden magic, she's also increasingly uncomfortable thinking about all the other people magic could help if it were used for healing. Coco feels especially guilty about Custas, who was injured and lost his dad in a landslide. The accident was partially caused by one of Coco's spells, which came out much stronger than it was supposed to. 

 

Custas is at the festival too, angry and volatile, using forbidden magic to compensate for his injured legs. And his dead dad is here, returned to a kind of cursed half-life by forbidden magic. The forbidden witch who taught Custas is here - she looks young and innocent, like one of the student witches. She wants an audience with the king, and extorts Coco to try to get one. Among her threats is the tantalizing promise that the king could truly heal Custas and his father.

 

The Knights Moralis are at the festival of course, there to prevent any breach of the Pact in the setting with the most contact between witches and ordinary people. They've arrested a very important witch, the old ambassador to the king, accusing him of taking bribes. And they've arrested a dirtbag witch who was selling magic glasses that can see through clothes (a very timely bit of commentary on Shirahama's part, considering one common use of AI image generators). One knight tried to arrest the forbidden witch who tutored Custas, but she turned the tables on him and erased his memory, taking almost everything he knew.

 

Now, in Witch Hat Atelier 12, in the king's jail, the old ambassador and the dirtbag plot to escape. The whole castle is warded against magic; it simply doesn't work inside. The ambassador draws a spell on the skin of the creep, with the idea that he can stick his hand out the window and get it to activate. (Apparently the ambassador already knew forbidden magic even if he didn't use it before his arrest.)

 

And that's what starts the disaster. As is so often the case, the king's jail has a guard monster, a leech that lived between the walls. When the creep sticks his hand out, the leech bites him, his blood mixes with the ink used to draw the spell on him, and everything goes wrong. The leech and man merge into one gigantic being, an impossibly vast multi-headed creature, like a net thrown over the entire festival biting at everyone there. 

 

The ambassador wryly observes that this is the secret reason for banning magic medicine and spells cast on bodies - that blood mixed with ink produces extraordinary, unpredictable results. This is a totally different justification than we've heard previously! (The avalanche that injured Custas happened after a forbidden witch replaced Coco's ink with something much more powerful. Could it have been as simple as ordinary ink mixed with blood?)

 

This is a disaster that could kill countless people. Olruggio and other adult witches use fire spells to burn the monster. The Knights Moralis try to fight the leeches and evacuate the public. They want to keep people safe, but they also fear too many people witnessing just how easily all the helping magic they've been seeing at the festival can be used as a weapon of war. In a moment of irony, the forbidden witch who looks like a school girl gets rescued from the leech by the knight whose memory she erased - he doesn't remember her, or anything really, but he still feels a duty to protect others.

 

Tetia and the other girls feel helpless watching ordinary people bandage the wounds of the injured, and start having doubts just like Coco's. Why shouldn't they do something to useful? In the chaos, Coco confesses what she's been thinking to Master Qifrey. His reaction isn't instant rejection as she feared it would be. He understands her doubts about the Pact.

 

Right now everything is chaos and everyone is in danger. The leeches can just barely be held back, but seemingly not truly injured or defeated. It's an ongoing disaster, and it'll continue in the next volume.

The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All 1

 
 
The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All 1
by Sumiko Arai

translated by Ajani Oloye

Yen Press

2024
 
 
The cover of The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All stands out for its eye-catching electric green background, and while most manga are black and white inside, cartoonist Sumiko Arai deploys the same neon green in the interior, often in the background or between panels, but also to highlight moments of emotional intensity, like when one if the teen characters speaks from the heart and Arai briefly colors their irises green.
 
The color-scheme, the theme of high school girls in a burgeoning but still undefined relationship, and the long title that invites some sort of shorthand has led to TGSWIIWAGAA getting nicknamed "green yuri" online.
 

The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All is really something special. I was expecting a sitcom-like comedy of errors where circumstance and coincidence conspire to maintain a case of mistaken identity far beyond the realm of plausibility, the sort of thing you really only see in old superhero comics (or parodies of them), where a woman swoons over the handsome superhero and has no time for her boring, oft-absent coworker and never suspects the connection. 
 
Instead, The Guy She Was Interested In is much more emotionally-realistic, with its setup mostly serving to set events in motion before allowing them to unfold in a more believable way. Arai really captures the intensity of teenage feelings, the way finding a song or a musical style feels like discovering something brand new, like something could define your whole identity if you wanted it to, the way making a new friend or getting to spend time with your crush feels like the most important thing in the world, even if you don't know what to call these exciting new emotions, or how to describe the way you spend so much time thinking about them and wondering if they're thinking of you. The fact that Arai's characters are often confused or hesitant or overwhelmed makes them feel all the more like real people, especially real teens, for whom all of this is completely new.
 
Popular high school girl Aya looks and acts a lot like her popular friends, but she's got two things special in her life right now. First, she's gotten really into American rock music from the 1990s. She talks it up to her friends, but they don't really see the appeal, so she always listens privately, at home or on headphones. The second big thing in Aya's life is that she's got a huge crush on the cute, mysterious guy who works at the CD shop. The guy has a goth or emo fashion sense, wearing all black, including a hoodie and dust mask, and likes the same music Aya does, even playing Nirvana at the store the same day she listened to them at school.
 
Aya tells her friends all about the guy, not noticing that the shy, nerdy girl sitting next to her is having a panic attack hearing this, because while Mitsuki tries to go unnoticed at school, she gets to dress how she wants at her after-school job at her uncle's CD shop... Mitsuki knows she should tell Aya right away, but she's too shy to do it at school, and at the store later, when Aya comes up to flirt with her, Mitsuki can't resist flirting back. She finds that she likes Aya too, and she likes that Aya likes her. Their friendship builds naturally, chatting at the shop, exchanging phone numbers and playlists, and all the while, Mitsuki knows she needs to get up the courage to tell the truth, even as she fears losing her new friend when she does...
 
Rather than using comedic mishaps to drag things out, Arai has Aya begin to suspect, then discover the truth, and has Mitsuki confess even after she worries Aya already knows, and then allows the girls to continue their friendship once the truth is out. Aya freely calls her feelings a crush when she thinks Mitsuki is a guy; later neither one seems to know what to call what they're feeling, except that they want to spend time together, and share their love of music with each other, as much as they can. I kind of think this might still be a romance, but it could also be a passionate friendship between two unexpected kindred spirits. It's clear the girls don't know what it is yet either. It feels authentic to a high school relationship, especially if neither girl previously thought of herself as queer.
 
Arai writes in 4-page scenes, which allows her to vary her chapter length in a way that most other manga artists can't. She varies the viewpoint across the scenes, mostly showing us things from Mitsuki's and Aya's perspectives, but sometimes others as well. We see them through the eyes of Mitsuki's uncle, who's simultaneously happy for his niece and feeling very old watching her grow up, and who intially fears the playlist Aya sent Mitsuki might've come from an adult man, a realistic concern that helps establish that not every possible young crush is appropriate or safe. 
 
We see them from the perspective of a good-looking boy in their class who's shocked that neither girl seems interested in him, but who gets over himself enough to become a friend (and to "ship" the two girls once they start hanging out more). And we see them as one of Aya's popular friends would, watching her bestie spend more and more time with a nerdy girl she seemingly has nothing in common with. Aya's friend might just be jealous, or she might be homophobic, but not everyone in the story is as happy about this new relationship as we in the audience are.
 
I was very pleasantly surprised by The Guy She Was Interested In, and recommend it to anyone who likes this kind of story.

Tower Dungeon 2

 
 
Tower Dungeon 2

by Tsutomu Nihei
translated by Sam Malissa

Kodansha

2025 

 

 

In the first volume of Tower Dungeon, super-strong farmboy Yuva got conscripted into the royal army to rescue the princess, who's been kidnapped by a necromancer and taken to the mountainous Dragon Tower. Yuva helped defeat a slime monster and recovered a gem that the necromancer says he's willing to trade for the princess. Then many of the royal guards were recalled to the capital, leaving Yuva with a straitlaced master archer and a bratty woman who knows fire magic.
 
Now in volume 2, the trio continues to explore for a safe (-ish) route up to level 100 where they can trade for the princess. Enriqo the archer leads them very cautiously. With their familiar staircase now guarded by giant suits of armor, he insists they map a new route. We learn that the dungeon is circular and 3 kilometers in diameter, which must make it like 15 or 18 km tall, given its proportions. Each level has numbered support pillars and is exactly 10 meters tall, though it seems that the very regularized main structure also holds more irregular and less well-built secondary features, perhaps later additions by less-skilled builders than the originals.
 
The trio gets lost in some repetitive, identical looking sections, then comes close to dying of thirst. Their equipment is stolen while they're sleeping, but when they give chase, they learn that the primordial human dungeon dwellers only wanted their salt (a precaution against another slime monster) for cooking. Yuva and his friends get back the rest of their stuff, plus some treasure, and the location of a water source and a secret staircase.
 
Back outside the fort, a boom town has sprung up to supply the soldiers going in. Besides Yuva's group, we meet a team of badass women adventurers who look like a roller derby team and all carry hammers, and a cat woman who wears a suit of armor. Fire mage Lilisen is eager to go back in the dungeon to beat out the new competitors. Yuva's sister has arrived from the village to work at the inn. She gets attacked by a 10 foot tall nobleman who can turn into a dragon, but the cat-lady knight protects her. Apparently everyone in the royal family is like 10 feet tall and a 'dracomorph', presumably including the princess.
 
Nihei seems to be drawing on tropes from both Dungeons & Dragons and dungeon crawling computer games like Rogue. The appearance of the stair guardians feels like a classic dungeon restocking procedure, and confusing architecture that trips you up as you make your own map is a staple of megadungeons as a genre. The sheer size of the place, and the identical superstructure of each level, is more like a video game though. Lilisen also shows Yuva you can break clay jars to find minor treasures, which is straight out of the Zelda games.
 
Yuva is our viewpoint character. He's from a small village and knows little of the outside world, so he needs Enriqo and Lilisen to explain how dungeons work to him. Along with us, he goggles at the noble cat woman and at the news that the kingdom's royalty are all giant shapeshifters. Yuva is kindhearted, which is why he talked to the salt thieves instead of fighting them. So far, his incredible strength has only been used for carrying heavy packs and breaking through a weakened wall into a secret passageway, but presumably he'll eventually use it for fighting, too. Yuva treats Enriqo like a boss and Lilisen like a sister, much to her annoyance.
 
The world Nihei is building here seems rough, crude, and brutal in a way that matches the style of his linework. The monsters are dangerous and strange in a way that borders on horror. The royal family is monstrous and inhuman, and at least one member is a Bluebeard-type who wants to cannibalize Yuva's actual little sister to prolong his life. Enriqo got a bladder infection when they ran out of water. The details add up to a world that's harsh and uncaring, where only people of incredible skill can survive.

I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up

 
 
I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up

by Kodama Naoko

translated by Amber Tamasaitis
Seven Seas

2019 

 

 

I kind of love the trend of Japanese fiction with long, descriptive titles. I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up is a standalone manga about two young women who are friends who make a marriage of convenience, and I know you're not going to believe this because such a story has never been told before, but after awhile of living together as roommates, they slowly, awkwardly start to develop romantic feelings for each other. The closest thing to a twist here is that one of them is already an out lesbian and has some feelings from the start.
 
Machi has a job in a corporate office. She works hard, has no interest in dating, and imagines herself living alone in the future. Her biggest problem is that her parents keep pressuring her to get married and have kids. She's lied to them and said she has a boyfriend, but that hasn't helped, and she doesn't want a real one. She wishes she could have a sham marriage just to stop them talking about it!
 
As luck would have it, Machi tells all these thoughts to Hana, her friend since high school. Hana is a couple years younger and wants to be an artist, and she's about to be evicted because her apartment building wants to upgrade. Hana suggests they help each other out. Machi will convince her parents to leave her alone, and Hana will have a chance to save up money and work on her freelancing by moving in. And same-sex civil partnerships are legal in their prefecture...
 
In general, I think Hana gets the better end of this bargain. She really is able to build up her artistic career, and she is very fond of her 'senpai' who she used to have a crush on back in high school. What Machi gets is an excuse for a blowout fight that lets her completely cut off contact with her parents, and to feel secretly smug when her male coworkers talk about wanting to marry their girlfriends.
 
But neither of them seems to expect how it'll affect them emotionally. Machi's spent her whole life being pressured to achieve certain visible markers of success by her parents, and meanwhile her boss assumes she'll quit when she becomes a wife or mother, so why bother promoting her? Seeing Hana do something she likes and cares about inspires Machi to try to get ahead at the office by taking on more ambitious projecs. And while Hana likes living with her friend, the marriage of convenience rekindles some rather inconvenient older feelings. It's hard being close to someone you're romantically interested in who doesn't like you back, and every time Hana expresses that interest, Machi rebuffs her and seems disgusted, which, you know, hurts. Hana doesn't like that she feels like a creep whenever she flirts, and decides that it'll be healthier for herself to try moving on.
 
Machi is our viewpoint character, and we follow her more closely. We see her warm up to Hana, and come to rely on her as a housemate. It's Hana finally saving enough money to get an apartment on her own again that forces Machi to admit what she's started to feel, and even when she does, Hana is worried that it's going to be hard to have a relationship with someone who doesn't really want to kiss or touch her. But she agrees to give it a try.
 
This is a pretty short one, told in three chapters. I'm not sure if Machi is asexual - she doesn't think of herself that way, but she also doesn't seem to be attracted to men, and her feelings for Hana are more platonic than physical. I think if I want to see a similar style of relationship, I could try reading the series How Do We Relationship? 
 
I think the thing author Kodama Naoko does best here is to use little flashbacks to show us Machi thinking about earlier incidents and gaining new perspective on them. I haven't read many fake dating romances, but the decision to have Hana know she's a lesbian, to have her attraction be part of her identity and not solely a consequence of her situation is an important part of the plot, and I think it might be a bit different from the typical. 

Witch Hat Atelier 11

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 11
by Kamome Shirahama
translated by Stephen Kohler

Kodansha

2023

 

 

In the previous volume of Witch Hat Atelier, we met a new witch who uses forbidden magic, a young witch who could easily pass for a fellow student. She threatened Coco and Tartah unless they can get into the Silver Eye parade and cast a spell that impresses the king enough to earn a private audience. It's a seemingly impossible request, especially since the parade is the next day! But Coco agreed to try, and then immediately started worrying herself sick over the difficulty of it.
 
Volume 11 opens with Coco accidentally waking Agott up because she's panicking. She's exactly like a student trying to do a big assignment all in one night. (I mean, I guess she's not just like that, I guess she technically is that, but it's not like Coco procrastinated - the assignment got sprung on her at the last minute by a bully who goes to another school!) Coco breaks down crying, begging Agott for help. She has writer's block, and she's overwhelmed by the stakes of what she's trying to do, although she can only tell Agott part of what's going on.
 
Agott catches herself thinking that Coco failing would mean less competition, and realizes she doesn't want to be that person anymore. She tells Coco about her own self-doubts, and that everyone feels like a hopeless failure sometimes. Everyone produces drawings they don't like, starts drafts they're not sure how to finish. (There's a bonus comic at the end of this volume that shows Master Olruggio working through these exact same doubts.) Agott encourages Coco to draw some spells for her own enjoyment, just to clear her head, and shows her a set of glyphs that, when added to another spell sigil, cause the finished spell effect to look like an animal.
 
Agott tells Coco about how she's sorry she was unfriendly when Coco first came to the atelier. This seems like a turning point in their friendship, like they'll be closer after this. Coco even stands up for Agott when another student witch who knew her before her falling out with her family tries to tease her.
 
Master Qifrey has noticed that something's up with Coco that she's keeping a secret. Olruggio has correctly noticed that Coco and Tartah are experiencing some form of young love, and encourages Qifrey to give her some privacy. Qifrey still thinks there's more than that going on, and he's right too, although I doubt he realizes Coco's being coerced, or that she and Tarah are harboring such intense doubts about the laws against healing magic.
 
Agott and Coco both get their spells finished and approved by the parade committee, so when the sun sets and the parade begins, they'll both get their turns to show off on one of the elevated platforms. The king is there watching (he secretly belongs to the last family of witches to know healing magic), along with large crowds of ordinary people. They reactions will help decide which spells the king will meet with the caster to buy.
 
When it's Coco's turn, we see that what she's made is new infrastructure for the sanitary disposal of sewage! Currently people empty their chamber pots into cesspits, and channels carry all the effluent to a single magical gate. As the sewage passes through, the water in the canal turns clear, and the concentrated filth drains off into a side channel. We learned earlier that in every city, this side channel drains into a Muckpool, which is always borders the poorest neighborhood. Coco's innovation is a purifying pot for each home. Empty your chamber pot into that, and you can dump cleaned water into the cesspits. Widespread adoption would dramatically improve life in the slums.
 
The crowd is not at all interested though. This would be a physically demanding extra step to dispose of their wastewater, and for people who don't live near the Muckpool, there'd be little direct benefit. Agott hops in to save the day though, making it look like Coco had only shown the first half of her spell, and like what happens next is the planned second part of the demonstration. (Agott marvels again at Coco's open-heartedness; that she accepts help easily without feeling threatened or undermined.) A new rune added to the spell makes to clean water flow back out of the purifying jug looking like flying fish, and the fish swim themselves through the air before diving into the nearest cesspit. Now the crowd is excited! No more lugging a heavy clay pot of wastewater to the dump site? That bit of saved labor appeals far more than the cleaning alone. Together, Coco and Agott have basically invented flush toilets.
 
They get a moment to celebrate their success, but only a moment, because from atop her parade float, Coco sees something, and the whole crowd sees it a moment later - a towering monster approaching the city from the harbor! The creature looks really weird, in a way that's hard to describe. It's hugely tall, but seems to be made of some kind of organic strands, so it's also quite insubstantial. 

We learn the truth, though none of the characters know it. In a jail cell in the king's palace, where no magic works inside, the witch ambassador and the guy who was selling glasses that can see through clothes, both of whom were arrested in volume 9, are imprisoned together. The ambassador smuggled in some ink for drawing spells, and convinced the other guy they could use it to escape by sticking an arm out the window, outside the spell dampening effect. I thought they'd try to draw a sigil on the outer wall, or perhaps on a scrap of fabric that they could just hold out the window ... but it seems the ambassador tricked the other guy into letting him draw on his skin, with disastrous consequences that will play out in the next volume.
 
I think Shirahama uses magic as a flexible metaphor that lets her talk about a number of different things, under the guise of simply telling a children's story about witches. So when some character asks, 'what is magic for?', they're really asking what is art for? what is technology for? what is power for? Why do we have these things? What are we supposed to do with them? Just because we can do something, should we actually do it? What are we doing it for? And at different times, magic is a stand-in for each of those different things. Because the spells are drawn, it's easy to see how the students' struggles to perfect their spells resembles the more general challenge of learning to draw well, including the importance of repetition, and the frustration that comes with struggle. We even saw that in this volume.

But some of the most interesting debates, I think, come when magic is being used as a metaphor for technology. In Shiraham's world, spells that are drawn are spells that are most useful for creating enchanted objects. And yes, there are unique works with a single owner, or specialty creations that only other witches ever use, but most enchanted objects, once they are invented, start being mass produced, used as city infrastructure, or owned and used directly in the households of the non-magical masses. So when Qifrey and Olruggio teach the girls about which spells should be allowed to be public, and why, they're instilling a set of values about what people deserve, and what they should be allowed to have if they want, and what should be forbidden.
 
Shirahama has created a flawed utopia, intentionally so. This magical world is upheld by artificial restrictions of who is permitted even to learn magic, and what they're allowed to do with it, and these rules are enforced in some of the most draconian ways possible, short of execution. But the world those rules create, the world they allow to flourish, is one where ordinary people have access to universal basic services that deliver a fairly decent standard of living to everyone, and where at least some of the people in power are constantly thinking about how to use their power to make people's lives better. 

There's a certain irony in Coco and Agott's new spell. Last volume, Master Qifrey gave a speech defending unobtrusive, reliable spells as more important than big flashy ones - but here it is the flash, the water turning into fish and flying away, that makes it work. 

 

Flush toilets and sanitary sewers are also emblematic of a certain way of thinking about what people need, and deserve. Access to clean water, the ability to go to the bathroom when you need to, and a way to dispose of wastewater so that it doesn't sicken you or contaminate your drinking water - these things are literally vital to human health, to life itself. They're also generally considered impolite or embarrassing to talk about. Milan Kundera devotes a whole chapter of The Unbearable Lightness of Being to the idea that you cannot truly love humanity unless you also love shit. You can't really help people if you're only willing to help them when their problem isn't distasteful or unsavory. 

In the early 20th century, the term 'sewer socialism' was initially used to mock the politicians and members of city government in Milwaukee who kept bragging about the benefits of the city's new sewer system. But they embraced it, and they were right to be proud, because they accomplished the very thing Coco hopes to do for the poor residents of the Muckpool neighborhood - save them from having to live alongside the stench and disease of an entire city's waste collecting beside their homes. There are a lot of magical effects Shirahama could have picked for Coco's spell. Through her choice, she's inviting her young readers to think about certain conveniences they've likely always taken for granted, and to consider why they're so important.

Tower Dungeon 1

 
 
Tower Dungeon 1

by Tsutomu Nihei

translated by Sam Malissa
Kodansha

2025 

Tower Dungeon is a new fantasy manga series by an artist who's best known for a couple of scifi series. In the first volume, it appears to be a fairly straightforward story about a quest to rescue a princess from a tower, although there are hints that things might become stranger as the story goes on. 

 

The tower, for example, is a megastructure. It's not big like a medieval tower, or even big like a modern skyscraper; it's big like a mountain, big like something only magic could make. It's white a covered in pillars, and it hovers hundreds of feet above the ground, accessible only by vertiginous staircases, and only when it floats past. One of Nihei's previous series, Blame!, is about an infinite city, and since we've only glimpsed the lowest levels of the tower, I suspect we'll see more fantastic architecture as we go. The way things work seems directly influenced by D&D and Delicious in Dungeon. The tower also reminds me of the one in Senlin Ascends, but I don't know if Nihei was influenced by it.

 

The first volume of Tower Dungeon opens in a small village, where superhumanly strong teen Yuva spends his days doing chores for his grandparents. When news reaches the village that the princess has been kidnapped and taken to the Dragon Tower, and that the royal army has already been decimated trying to rescue her, Yuva's neighbors are quick to offer him up to the military recruiters to spare their own sons from conscription.

 

Yuva travels to the base of the tower with only a barrel lid as a shield and a small metal cookpot that looks like a wide-brimmed hat to wear as a helmet (a bit like Don Quixote and his shaving bowl). The surviving soldiers are covered in bandages and eye patches and slings. A small expeditionary force of the leaders and the new recruits go back in. Yuva's strength is put to work carrying barrels of salt on his back to use against a slime monster on level 50. Along the way, they find rare mushrooms that can be used in a powerful healing potion, fight off several waves of skeletons in armor, and meet a badly-wounded but still firebreathing dragon.

 

On level 50, the 'slime monster' is a bizarre giant humanoid that's protected by a thick carapace of translucent slime. Yuva manages to dissolve the slime with the salt, but before anyone can finish the fight, a strange tentacled man appears and threatens to kill the princess unless they spare the monster. The princess speaks up to say that he wants her as a live hostage for now, so they shouldn't let this threat scare them! When the slime monster dies, a coin-like token appears, and the tentacled man says they can trade the token for the princess up on level 100.

 

Back on the ground, we learn that the remaining royals have decided to coronate a replacement, and are recalling the guards to the ceremony. Outfitted in better armor, Yuva is left behind with a master archer and a young woman who can use fire magic to continue the rescue on their own. I suspect the main plot next time will continue following Yuva and his new companions, but I hope we'll also learn more about what's going on in the kingdom, why the princess was kidnapped, who the weird man who took her is, and so on.

 

Nihei's art has a kind of rough quality to it, like his pens can only produce thick lines with wobbly edges. It immediately looks harsh and brutal compared to Witch Hat Atelier, for example. The story here also seems more violent and might go on to include more sex. Nearly all the soldiers except Yuva have been injured or maimed; the fire magician wears a modest black cloak ... but nothing underneath, as we realize when her cloak floats away from her body while she conjures a bonfire.

 

In addition to monumental architecture that, for all its neoclassical and gothic flourishes looks more science fictional than fantastic, Nihei's monster designs are strange enough to spill over from dark fantasy into weird fiction. The slime monster, for example, might've been a traditional cube shape or an amoeba, but instead it was a humanoid secreting its own slime armor. The dragon looked like pterodactyl. The tentacled man is so asymmetrical he looks less like Cthulhu and more like Swamp Thing or Man Thing. I'm curious to see what's next.

Witch Hat Atelier 10

 
Witch Hat Atelier 10

by Kamome Shirahama
translated by Stephen Kohler

Kodansha

2022

 

 

In the last volume of Witch Hat Atelier, the girls and their teachers went to the Silver Eye festival, where ordinary people can watch demonstrations of magic and buy magical contraptions, and where witches can show off for each other.
 
Now in volume 10, cool aloof girl Richeh sells all her crystal bracelets and discovers she really enjoys helping the old wandmaker operate his booth. She's kind of shocked herself by discovering something she genuinely wants to do, which is to open her own magic shop someday.
 
Cheerful Tetia sees someone sneaking around, hiding from the royal guards, and discovers it's the young prince, a boy about her age. She helps him get away and temporarily swaps accessories with him, wearing his expensive royal cloak while he dons her witch hat and capelet. Tetia is happy to declare the two of them friends, but the way he accepts her friendship suddenly makes her uncomfortable in a way she doesn't really understand. He announces that when he's king, she'll be beside him as a friend and advisor 'like in days of yore.'
 
Tetia doesn't know it, but we've seen the witches who use forbidden magic use that 'days of yore' phrase too - and what they mean is the time before the current age, when magic was widespread and wildly destructive, used as a tool of politics and warfare. Tetia also doesn't know that the king, who last volume seemed so respectful of witches' self-imposed rules, is secretly the last person in a very long line of witches who knows how to use healing magic, which is now forbidden because it affects human bodies directly. Presumably his son will learn it too. Master Qifrey does know this secret, and tells Agott and Coco, which will be relevant later.
 
Agott, the best student in the atelier, has an emotional breakdown because Qifrey and Olruggio won't let her march in the Silver Eye parade, which would be her chance to show off a spell. She was hoping to catch the attention of her distant mother, the librarian of the Great Tower, who she hasn't seen in years. Agott is semi-estranged from her family because despite her talent and hard work, they consider her some kind of disappointment. 
 
Qifrey explains that personal glory is the wrong reason to use magic, and also, he warns her that her mom won't be the only one watching, and that there are people who's attention she doesn't want to attract. Then he tells her about the king, which makes Tetia's situation seem even more ominous. Qifrey also articulates a defense of unobtrusive, utilitarian magic that's maybe the clearest we've heard so far, and that could apply to almost any technology. He notes that softly glowing lanterns that never go dark are less impressive than giant serpents made of fire streaking across the sky; the ever-refilling water jugs people use to get clean drinking water aren't as showy as a perpetual typhoon pulling water from the clouds; but the lantern and the jug help far more people in far more consistent ways than the serpent or the storm ever could. It sounds a lot like a call to use technology to provide people with basic universal services.
 
Meanwhile, Coco and Tartah have some big problems that they're keeping secret. They met Custas, the boy who was injured when he fell in the river. Now he has magical wooden leg braces, and he seems to know forbidden magic. The young witch who taught it to him shows up too, dressed more-or-less like any other young witch instead of looking obviously evil like the others we've seen. (That's her on the cover. She could easily pass for a student witch.) She demands that Coco and Tartah get themselves into the Silver Eye parade, do something so impressive it gets them an audience with the king, and then allow Custas and this forbidden witch to join them and meet the king too. That's a big, maybe impossible request! I feel like there ought to be some kind of 'or else,' but it's not explicit. Coco agrees to try anyway. We also don't know exactly why they want to meet the king, although presumably the reason is not good.
 
After getting away from that, Coco and Tartah run into Custas's father Dagdah, who's looking for his son. We saw him get attacked by bandits, but he doesn't seem to remember that. Coco realizes there's a spell drawn on his chest, which is forbidden, and when she realizes what the spell is, it completely breaks her heart. It's a counter-clock spell that can be used to temporarily mend broken things ... but it's a short spell, and when it runs out, the thing breaks again just like before. Coco realizes Custas has been reapplying this spell several times a day to keep his father alive, and she knows that if she could've, she would've done the same for her mother after accidentally turning her to stone. 
 
In fact, Dagdah was killed by the bandits, and while he was dying, the forbidden witch showed up, drew the spell on him, and taught it to Custas. But Dagdah has only a half-life. He has no memories since just before the attack, and he keeps dying painfully each time the spell runs out while Custas is redrawing it. Knowing the king's secret, Coco wonders if he could heal Dagdah, and becomes even more committed to inventing a new spell in time for the parade. (Although it's not clear to me that the king would be willing to heal a traveling musician, even if he's able.)
 
A member of the Knights Moralis shows up and tries to arrest Dagdah, but Custas arrives and attacks him with the wooden tentacles of his leg braces. Coco and Tartah run away. Then the forbidden witch uses one of the Knights' own spells against him - erasing all memory of magic from his mind, which in this case means erasing almost all his memories altogether.
 
There's one really noticeable change to Shirahama's art in this volume. They style is the same, but there are a lot more large panels showing close-ups of people's emotions at key moments. I don't know if this is easier for her because it means fewer panels, or harder because they're more detailed, but it makes this volume look different than the ones before. She uses this new approach to pretty good effect though. There's not as much action this time, but there are several moments where someone feels a powerful or complex emotion that motivates their actions going forward, and seeing those moments enlarged both emphasizes the strength of what's being felt and makes it easier to see the nuance.

I think the parade's going to be in the next volume, and thus that several of these plots will come together dramatically. Coco may really, really want to march, but I don't know how she's going to be able to invent a new spell that's worthy, and convince Master Qifrey to let her. I'm pretty sure the parade is the next day, which doesn't seem like enough time. 

The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend

 
 
The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend

by Mieri Hiranishi

Viz Media

2023

 

 

The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend is a graphic memoir about a young woman's brief first relationship and her long mourning period after her first breakup. The Girl is presented manga style, small pages, black and white, read from right to left, but it's not a translation; Hiranishi lives in America and wrote her comic in English.
 
There's a pretty stark contrast between the very simple, stylized way Hiranishi draws Mieri (her younger self) and the comparatively realistic style she uses for everyone else. At the start of the comic, the difference seemed amusingly self-deprecating, but as the overall tone gets darker, the visual reminder of Mieri's low self-esteem began to seem increasingly sad.
 
In the first half of the comic, Hiranishi talks about her childhood sexual awakening and realizing she's attracted to butch women from watching Sailor Uranus on Sailor Moon. She shows us her awkward (and unrequited) first crush on an out lesbian high school classmate. In college, she tries online dating without much success. At this point, her foibles seem pretty relatable, and her lack of romantic confidence something I think a lot of people experience at first. In her junior year, Mieri meets Ash while spending a semester studying abroad in Japan. Ash is an English teacher from America, only a couple years older. Mieri clearly experienced their relationship as a kind of idyllic first love.
 
But Meiri has to return to America, and while they call themselves a long-distance couple for awhile, Ash eventually breaks up with Mieri on a video call. At this point, Mieri spirals into what I think is actually a pretty typical post-breakup depression. I've experienced it a few times myself. Obsessively thinking about the other person, hoping to get back together, feeling lonely, feeling like you'll never find someone who wants to date you again, grieving for the future you imagined together, being angry at them for hurting you, etc. But Mieri gets stuck like this, not just for a weeks or months, but for like four years.
 
In the meantime, she goes through the steps of young adulthood. Getting an internship and first job, graduating, attempting to take better care of herself. She tries dating guys, but has no interest in sleeping with them, or even in dating the same guy twice. But throughout all this, she remains brokenhearted and unable to emotionally move on. It seems like this was a really dark few years for her internally, even as she outwardly got her life together. Ultimately, it's writing this comic that finally gives Hiranishi closure.
 
Memoir and autobiography are tricky. On the one hand, it seems like Hiranishi needed to write this, and perhaps to write it this way as part of her healing process. Before being collected and published, The Girl that Can't Get a Girlfriend was a webcomic, almost an online diary, and clearly it attracted enough readers to earn Hiranishi a book deal. She had no editor while she was writing, and I really don't know how much she might've revised the comics before they went into print. 
 
But on the other hand, I think the book itself would've been better if she'd been able to maintain a lighter tone, if not so much of the text was seemingly a stream of consciousness substitute for therapy. Maybe that version would never have resonated with as many people, never made it off the screen and onto the page? But I think Hiranishi's observation and humor are a stronger basis for a book than an unfiltered outpouring of her pain. And I think she might not've stayed sad for quite so long if eventually, finally putting all these feelings down in drawings hadn't been her only way of resolving them instead of continuously ruminating. I hope that if Hiranishi writes another comic, she'll be able to create from a healthier place, emotionally.

Witch Hat Atelier 9

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 9

by Kamome Shirahama
translated by Stephen Kohler

Kodansha

2022 

 

 

It's been a minute since I've read any Witch Hat Atelier. In volume 8, Master Qifrey agreed that he and his students would help run a booth at the upcoming Silver Eve festival with the wandmaker and his grandson Tartah. Coco and Tartah are clearly developing feelings for each other, but neither seems to know how to say so out loud yet. Coco and Tartah are also both harboring doubts about some of the witch laws against magical healing, and they help Custas (the son of a traveling performer who was injured in a landslide) by making him a new mobility aid he can use instead of a walking chair - a cloak that allows him to levitate.
 
At the start of this volume, one of the Knights Moralis, the special order of witches who enforce their laws about magic (mostly by erasing the memory of anyone who breaks them), learns that Custas has returned his magical walking chair to the hospital, not because he recovered, but because he got other help and no longer needs it. This is unusual, and the knight finds it suspicious. I don't think Coco or Tartah broke any rules, but it's still not great that the witch police might suspect them.
 
Qifrey and the girls are taking a horse and wagon to the festival so they can perform acts of service along the way, something that's required of full-fledged witches as a kind of noblesse oblige. In this case, they're fixing worn out magic fenceposts that help keep wild animals from venturing into settled places. When they get to the festival, they'll be selling magical devices at their booth.
 
Tetia plans to sell walking sticks that let you make a tent anywhere by pulling up the surface of the ground like it's a tarp. Riceh made paired bracelets that will shine a light between them when you push a button, which causes two half-sigils inside the bracelet to line up and activate. She also made six rings for everyone in the atelier plus Tartah; I suspect will see this emergency locator beacon get some use in a future volume. Coco made more levitating cloaks, like the one she gave to Tartah - not enough to sell, but a few so festival goers can essentially put one on to experience the power of magical flight as a carnival ride. Surprisingly, Agott hasn't made a contraption, because she wants to perform a spell in the parade, which Qifrey and Olruggio seem reluctant to allow her to do.
  
When they arrive at the festival, the kids go explore for a bit before helping set up, and we get an interlude to check on a couple other things. Our first stop is inside the royal palace, which has been enchanted so that no magic will work inside, and no magic devices can even enter. The local kingdom is on a peninsula, and has five member states. Several of the state-leaders are hassling the new witch-ambassador to request that, in addition to helping with natural disasters, the witches start helping to protect people from bandit attacks. (In fact, we saw Custas and his dad get attacked by bandits at the very end of the last volume!) The king shows up and reaffirms his commitment to the witches' independence, but it seems clear that relations between the general public and the powerful, secretive, self-governing magicians in their midst are a bit tense.
 
The old witch-ambassador is very surprised to learn he's been replaced, and the Knights Moralis arrest him for accepting bribes to do personal favors for rich patrons that go beyond the scope of what the king and new ambassador just laid out.
 
Then, separately, we see one of the knights rush off to arrest someone for selling an illegal magical device, in this case, glasses that can see through clothing. He makes excuses, but she's having none of it, and arrests him. The case causes her to think back to when she was an apprentice and her teacher lent her to a rich patron who tried to abuse her. She got in trouble with her teacher when she complained. He even tried to get the Knights Moralis to erase her memory so she'd stop protesting. But the knight who handled the case believed her and stood up for her, which I suppose is why she became a knight herself.
 
It's interesting to me that twice in this volume, we've seen the Knights Moralis portrayed fairly positively. Up until now, their inflexible moral code and incorruptible resistance to any requests for mercy have basically made them, if not exactly antagonists, then at least a looming threat to Coco, but here we see some value in those traits. Because Coco has done what no one is supposed to do - become a witch by learning the secret of magic, which is that it's not innate in the caster, it's a skill that anyone can learn to use by drawing sigils. Coco also accidentally turned her mother to stone by copying a sigil from a book of forbidden magic, and she wants to learn how to undo the process. If they knew all that, the knights would probably erase Coco's memory all the way back to before she learned the secret, and also leave her mother as stone forever. But here, we see them doing necessary self-policing of witch misconduct.
 
Tartah and Coco walk around the festival together. Coco is sad because she remembers being like so many of the non-witch kids who are attending. She loved magic and wished she could become a witch. She's not allowed to tell anyone the truth, but she can't bear lying to them either, or seeing their dreams crushed. Tartah really wants to hold hands with Coco, but instead gives her the custom wand-pen he designed for her, with a grip like the chalk stone Coco used to use to mark fabric when she worked in her mom's tailor shop, before she learned magic. Tartah doesn't know about that, but he saw how Coco wrote with her old wands, and inferred the right shape for her.
 
And because you just know that things can't remain calm all the way to the end of the volume, Custas shocks Coco and Tartah when he shows up at the festival. He's walking now, thanks to some new magical wooden leg braces, given to him after the bandit attack by a witch who uses forbidden magic, and he now seems unhinged and angry with Coco and Tartah for not healing him. The leg braces can like, grow terrifying root-tentacles, which he uses to capture his former friends, and up close, his legs now look withered and dying, which I guess is a consequence of the spell. I kind of think his wild-eyed derangement is because of the spell too, but Coco and Tartah feel guilty regardless, because they both secretly want to break witch law to heal people, although they haven't done so yet. The witch who gave Tartah the braces shows up too, so the next volume is going to be exciting! 

7th Time Loop 3

 
 
7th Time Loop 3

The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy!

by Touko Amekawa

art by Hinoki Kino
translated by Hana Allen

Seven Seas

2023

 

  

7th Time Loop follows the adventures of Rishe, a girl who has repeatedly died at 20 and then returned to a pivotal moment at age 15. In her first six lives, she's become a merchant, an apothecary, a maid, and a soldier, and each time she's died in a war started by the tyrant Arnold Hein. Now in her seventh life, Rishe has become Arnold's fiance, years before he starts his deadly war, and to her surprise, he seems like a compassionate leader, not a brutal conqueror. She hopes that by marrying him, she can intervene to prevent him from starting the war.
 
In the previous volume, Rishe briefly met Arnold's scheming younger brother, and decided to try to reconnect with the merchant company she traveled with in her first life. She wants them as allies, but they've never met her, so she has to convince them.
 
Now, at the start of volume 3, Rishe studies some of the details of how Arnold has ruled, and plots to impress her old boss. She thinks the easiest way would be to provide luxuries for him to sell to aristocrats, but reading some recent history convinces her to try something else. It seems Arnold's been building a welfare state! After the last war, the hinterlands were depopulated, food was expensive, and the country had too many unemployed former soldiers. Arnold bought food at a premium and sold it at a loss - the farm subsidies attracted veterans to farming and supported the rural population, and the food aid helped the kingdom's poor get enough to eat. It's kind of shocking to me to see an extended example and defense of social democracy in a fantasy comic!
 
Rishe's plan involves more welfare capitalism. Basically she wants to implement the post-WWII consensus on corporate governance (prior to the rise of leveraged buyouts in the 1980s) - sell an affordable product, pay a living wage, and your own business practices will grow your customer base. Rishe recreates a nail polish she previously invented as an apothecary. She offers it to the merchants on the condition they sell it cheap and hire currently-unemployed people to make it. The merchant captain starts out all swaggering bravado, but eventually sees the profit potential in Rishe's proposal, and anachronistic welfare politics prevail.
 
The rest of the volume involves a lengthy plot about Arnold's younger brother kidnapping Rishe. Rishe is waaay more competent than he was prepared for though. She easily escapes and trounces his many guards. She also realizes he was trying to provoke a fight with Arnold. Rishe hopes that by repairing the brothers' relationship, she can help prevent a future where Arnold becomes a tyrant.

Witch Hat Atelier 8

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 8

by Kamome Shirahama
translated by Stephen Kohler

Kodansha

2021

 

 

Last time on Witch Hat Atelier, the girls and their teachers returned home from the Great Tower, and Tartah, the wand maker's grandson, invited them to help him run a stall at the upcoming festival. We also learned that Coco has been struggling with her feelings about forbidden magic. Any spells cast directly on the body are forbidden - so there might not be a way to rescue her mother from being turned to stone without breaking witch law.
 
Now in volume 8, the girls talk Master Qifrey and Olruggio into letting them help out. Agott's the only one who's not excited - I think because she's not looking forward to seeing her family at the festival, and Tartah's prominent booth makes a run in that much more likely. Tartah was planning to assist his grandfather in running the booth like usual, but his grandfather took a fall and is healing up in the hospital. Tartah isn't an apprentice yet, so Coco and the others are the only other witches he knows to ask.
 
Also, I was right, this is a date. Or at least, kind of. Tartah clearly does like Coco, and she likes him too. They're both like 10 or 12 though, so these feelings are new and unfamiliar to both of them.
 
Tartah and the girls will need to work together to prepare for the festival. Coco goes back to the wand shop with him, and they stop by the hospital to visit his grandfather. (There's no mention of it here, but I wonder if Qifrey erasing a bit of the wand maker's memory might be part of why he got dizzy and fell...)
 
In the hospital, they also see Custas, the boy who was injured when the bridge washed out back in volume 2. He's got a walking chair now, like Master Bel, and without realizing what it means, he mentions to Coco that Tartah's been teaching him to read and helping him learn about medicine. Because they're forbidden to use magic on the body, witches are also forbidden to learn medicine. Tartah confesses to Coco that he has been studying, and he has serious doubts about the laws that forbid, for example, magical healing. Coco doesn't confide her own doubts back (yet?) but she does help Tartah keep his secret.
 
Coco and Tartah work together to make an alternative to the walking chair for Tartah. He and his adopted father are traveling entertainers, and the terrain they cover is simply too rugged for him to return to that life with the walking chair as his only mobility aid. They make him a cloak that lets him hover off the ground, and has built-in crutches for when he wants to stand. Custas really wishes he could be healed, but Coco and Tartah lie and assure him that it's impossible, that magic only works on objects and not on living things.
 
I find the representation of disability in this comic interesting. We've now seen three people with physical disabilities - Tartah is profoundly colorblind, and Master Bel and now Custas need walking chairs to get around. In most other stories, magic healing means that we don't usually see lifelong injuries or assistive technology.
 
I'm not sure if Coco and Tartah are going to date or be friends, but I suspect they're going to become a conspiracy of two. They're both thinking about breaking the rules, and witch society is draconian, so much so that they could be punished just for speaking their doubts aloud, let alone acting on them. It's a place where they might only be able to rely on each other.
 
Throughout the series so far, we've seen that forbidden magic cause terrible individual harm and wreak destruction on a geographic scale. So there's a reason witches have their rules, and a reason they keep it a secret that anyone could do magic ... with the right tools and the right techniques. But the rules are enforced with violence - by erasing people's memories to censor any forbidden knowledge. The memory erasure spell isn't just used on witches who cast forbidden magic, it's used on non-witches who learn the secret, and on anyone who's been a victim of it. (The memory spell should, by all rights, be forbidden too.) Potentially helpful forms of magic are forbidden alongside the obviously dangerous stuff. It's no wonder Coco and Tartah have doubts. I have them too.
 
At the end of the volume, Custas reunites with his dad and they get ready to resume their traveling show. They're attacked by bandits, and the father left for dead. Afterward, a young witch, a girl who might be Coco's age, finds Custas and his dying father, and offers them true magical healing. She's one of the witches who uses forbidden magic...

Witch Hat Atelier 7

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 7

by Kamome Shirahama
translated by Stephen Kohler

Kodansha

2021

 

 

In the previous volume of Witch Hat Atelier, the girls took a make-up exam after Agott and Richeh's public magic use exam was interrupted by the Brimmed Cap witches, the ones who use forbidden magic. Their teacher, Master Qifrey, was unconscious in the hospital after being injured while protecting his students. At the end of the exam, Master Bel, who was Qifrey's own teacher, invited Coco to come live in the great tower at the bottom of the ocean, where she'll be safe from the Brimmed Caps ... and from Qifrey? But why would he say that?

Now, in volume 7, we find out several secrets of Qifrey's past, and learn more about his opposition to the Brimmed Caps, and his pledge to help Coco return her mom from being turned to stone. This volume feels like a turning point in the series. There's a little forward motion, but most of what happens this volume is in flashbacks. We learn more about what's happened so far, and also get some setup and preparation for what's likely to happen next.
 
We learn that as a child, Qifrey was a victim of the Brimmed Cap witches. They stole his eye, erased his memories, and buried him alive in a coffin. Master Bel found him, and instead of returning him to ordinary life as the witches' law demands, adopted him as his apprentice - just as grown up Qifrey has done for Coco. But for a long time, Qifrey was absolutely driven in searching for the Brimmed Caps, which is why Bel and Qifrey's friend (and his atelier's monitor) Olruggio are worried. They both fear that he's just using Coco as a clue in his lifelong quest for revenge, rather than genuinely working for her best interests. (Incidentally, if they've been friends since their student days, then Ruggio is a TERRIBLE choice to actually monitor Qifrey's atelier for abuse or misconduct!)
 
As a reader, I have to say I have concerns about Qifrey myself. He seems to be an excellent teacher, and to care greatly for his students. But he also erased a memory from the wand master, supposedly to protect Coco after she accidentally used cursed ink the Brimmed Caps gave her. And now he erases a memory from Olruggio.  It seems possible that he does have a secret agenda, that he is using Coco and the other girls, and that the way he acts with them is indeed an act. Or, maybe he is as nice as he seems to be, he is doing his best to teach and prepare them, and the couple now crimes he's committed really have been to protect the kids. I want Qifrey to be as nice as he seems to be, but among fictional characters and real people alike, 'nice' can sometimes turn out to be nothing more than a disguise. Time will tell...
 
Coco has a crisis of her own in this volume, because she's really starting to doubt that her mom can be saved by following the rules of magic that the rest of the witches all follow. Specifically, those laws forbid magic that affects the body - which is why there's no healing magic, and lots of devices to help people do things rather than spells that directly give them some ability - and the laws require erasing the memory of anyone who performs forbidden magic, as well as anyone who's the victim of it.
 
The legal plan Coco is following, this volume reminds us, is two-part. She's studying magic so she can learn enough to create a reversal spell. And also, by passing her exams, she'll earn a prize given to all graduating witches, a copy of any book on the planet, courtesy of the Tower of Tomes, which will let her find the spellbook she unknowingly copied the petrification sigil from. The only way to draw a reversal symbol is to know exactly what the original looked like.
 
Qifrey tries to reassure Coco that this plan will work. But Coco's crisis, her fear, is that the legal plan won't work. And if not, she'll have to make a choice. Is she willing to use forbidden magic herself to save her mother? Or really, is she willing to let her mom stay turned to stone just to obey a law she only knows about because someone else broke it by creating the petrification spell? It's a fear Coco doesn't dare verbalize to anyone, no matter how much she thinks she trusts them, though you can see she's almost bursting with the desire to confess her dilemma to an adult.
 
The volume ends with the students, Qifrey, and Olrggio all arriving back home at the atelier. Tartah, the wand master's grandson, arrives too. There's about to be a festival in town, and (although I expected he was going to ask Coco on a date) he wants all the girls to join him in operating a booth.

Shuna's Journey

 
 

Shuna's Journey

by Hayao Miyazaki

translated by Alex De Wit

First Second

2022

 

 

Shuna's Journey is one of Miyazaki's earliest works, only recently translated into English. He drew it before he had an animation studio, before his famous manga Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. And yet, I see echoes of many of his other works in this one, or rather, I see now that there are echoes of Shuna in much of what he made later. This book is quietly excellent.
 
The style here isn't a traditional manga; the translator calls it an emonogatari, which almost literally translates as graphic novel. There are no word bubbles and only a little dialogue. Most of the text is narration, and it's all printed directly over still places in the art. Rather than crisp black and white drawings divided into panels, Miyazaki gives us what look like pencil sketches painted with watercolor. I don't mean to make it sound unskilled - it feels warm and humane, it's just that none of the edges are crisp or sharp, none of the colors fully saturated.
 

Shuna is based on a Tibetian folktale, about how barley first came to their country, but transposed into a distant, post-apocalyptic future. Shuna is a teen boy, the prince of a small community living with their antelope-like 'yakuls' in a deep mountain valley. Their seeds grow only small grains, and hunger is ever-present. One day Shuna meets a dying traveler. He claims to be the ruler of a kingdom to the east, on a journey to the west to find a place where golden seeds grow into large, filling grains. He has some of the seeds, but they've hulled and will never grow.
 
Shuna takes a yakul, his sword and rifle, and sets off to find the golden seeds for himself. Along the way, he sees ruins of civilizations past ... and slave traders with caged wagons full of captives. He makes his way to a trading city. There are merchants selling hulled grain, but no seeds, and everywhere there are captives. Shuna learns that none of these people grow their own grain. It's grown by the 'god-folk' in the west, who trade it for slaves.
 
Shuna meets a pair of enslaved sisters; older sister Thea is around his own age. He wants to free them. First he offers to buy them, but Thea refuses. He tries to continue his journey, but he's troubled by what he's seen. Eventually he mounts a rescue of the girls, and all three escape together. They reach the border of the strange land where the god-folk dwell. Shuna gives Thea his Yakul. She and her little sister ride away to find a village.
 
Shuna enters the land of the god-folk, sees what becomes of the slaves that are brought in, steals some seeds, and escapes, but loses his memory and his possessions in the process. Somehow he wanders to the village where Thea has settled. In secret, she cares for him, nurses him back to health, grows the seeds into crops, harvests more seeds. In the end Shuna is restored, and there are enough seeds for Shuna and Thea and her sister to leave and return to his homeland.
 
The tale is relatively simple, but told well. There's a moral complexity to Shuna's encounter with slavery for example. He has no part in the system of trading human lives for grain, he is nearly powerless to do much about it, but his conscience also won't let him do nothing. And Thea is no damsel. She is strong from the start, and eventually saves Shuna as much as he saves her.
 
And Miyazaki's art is excellent throughout. Shuna's clothes resemble traditional Tibetan garb. The city and its dwellers have more colorful, outlandish outfits. The most compelling images come from the ruins of the old world and the bizarre land of the god-folks, which combines the new, the alien, the deeply ancient. The strange and magical landscapes and creatures that eventually made Miyazaki famous are visible in their early form here.

Witch Hat Atelier 6

 

Witch Hat Atelier 6

by Kamome Shirahama
translated by Stephen Kohler

Kodansha

2020

 

 

In Witch Hat Atelier 6, the girls are whisked off to the Great Hall, the enormous castle that serves as the center of witch society, at the bottom of the ocean! And they all get a chance to take a magic test, but to pass, they have to surprise one of the masters of the Hall...

In the previous volume, the Brimmed Cap Witches, who practice forbidden magic, attacked the testing site where Agott and Richeh were trying to earn permission to use magic in front of civilians. Their teacher, Qifrey, was badly injured, and Euini, a student from another atelier, was tattooed with a curse that turned him into a wolf. Fearing that the puritanical Knights Moralis would erase Euini's memory, or worse, imprison or kill him, the witch proctoring the test took responsibility for hiding Euini and trying to cure him.

And the Knights did show up! Fortunately Olruggio is there too - another adult witch who lives at the atelier, a standard practice basically to ensure the teacher isn't mistreating the students. He makes sure that Qifrey is taken straight to the hospital, and that the girls are questioned rather than interrogated. Even in this secure bastion of magic, the doctors and nurses aren't witches. To prevent forbidden magic that's cast on the body, they can't learn any magic, and witches can't learn any medicine. Qifrey spends the rest of the book unconscious while he heals.

After telling what they know (except what happened to Euini), Coco, Agott, Richeh, and Tetia are introduced to Master Beldaruit, one the most knowledgeable witches in the world, who rides around the palace on a goat-legged walking throne. I wasn't sure if this was a necessary mobility aid, like a magical wheelchair, or if it's just an affectation because he's just that whimsical. Since Agott and Richeh's test was interrupted, and since Coco and Tetia helped when they were trapped in the magic cave, Master Bel gives them all a chance to retake the test. They can earn the right to use magic in public if they can surprise him.

This is, of course, harder than they first think. The solution involves thinking about who their audience is, and what might satisfy that person - good advice about rhetoric and communication for the real world manga readers as well as the fictional witches. While they're studying, we get a tour of the Great Hall, where most witch children grow up. Coco also hears a rumor that Agott was rejected by her famous family for plagiarism, essentially, claiming credit for a spell someone else invented. Coco doesn't believe it, although it's clear that something happened to estrange Agott from her family, so this is probably a clue of some sort.

The girls do pass the test, and Master Bel invites Coco to come live in the Hall, where she can get socialized, and be safe from both the Brimmed Cap Witches and from Qifrey. Why should she need protection from Qifrey? An excellent (and cliffhanging) question!