Maliciously terrible.
Creative Staff
Story: Masaki Hiramatsu
Art: Takashi Tensugi
Translation: William Flanagan
What They Say:
Kidnapped and stuffed into a trunk by an unknown assailant, teenager Kazumi bursts forth from the confines of the case to discover that she has been stripped not only of her clothes, but also of the memories of her life before the kidnapping. When she is recovered by a pair of schoolgirls, she doesn’t recognize them as her best friends and roommates, Umika and Kaoru. As Kazumi tries to settle back into her normal life, she quickly realizes that her former “normal” was anything but!
Technical:
As an appropriate match to the contents of the book, the cover shown off here is a bit of a mess. It’s an image of the main trio, all shot in different poses and placed over a white background. It’s a little hard to figure out how they’re exactly placed, for some reason Kazumi’s shoes are casting a reflection, and it’s not even framed very well. It also shows off the rather awkward, sloppy proportions and poses of the art, with the pose of Kazumi’s right arm in particular looking nonsensical and painful. And then to top it all off, multicolored dots are slapped haphazardly all over the place, some fuzzy and some blurry, some in the background, and some thrown right over the characters. If you don’t look at it closely it might seem okay, but the more you stare at it, the worse it gets. The back cover fairs slightly better, likely due to only having one character instead of three, but it still shares many of the issues presented by the front. The paper quality at least feels solid, and some extras such as mini-comics are included at the end.
The text is serviceable, but the lack of any kind of translation notes could prove a serious issues for readers, as the book feels free to throw around not only honorifics, but also Japanese specific cultural terms (oh hey, ganguro fashion is a key point in this chapter! Good thing US readers are familiar with that!) and of course series specific terms as well. It’s not unreadable, but the lack of any kind of additional aid for new readers is a serious issue here. Sound effects are left in their original form and translated.
The art used throughout the book is perhaps one of its biggest issues. Though action makes up a large percentage of the volume, the artist just plain can’t draw it well. Things don’t flow properly, leaving most of the book looking like a jumbled mess. As mentioned above with the cover, proportions also don’t come out right a lot of the time, with poses looking just plain awkward and limbs shrinking and growing into grotesque shapes. Objects will also simplify a little too much at times, and the “shading” used will sometimes result in large blobs of black in an approximate shape of what it should be (usually characters’ clothes). Even the bread and butter of the anime, the slick character designs, are ruined by the slap-dash originals created here to replace them, such as the villain who not only uses guns, but also summons bulls for… some reason. It’s not only an ugly book, it’s a book whose art actually makes it difficult to read.
Content:
Showing us just how intensely intellectual our journey will be, the book opens with a confused naked young girl popping out of a box. Though she assaults the man whose apartment she wakes up in, she quickly realizes that he ended up with a box containing her instead of the bomb he was expecting. She knows that her name is Kazumi, but absolutely nothing else. The kidnapper then calls to propose a trade, and Kazumi decides to hop back in the box and let the trade go through, hoping she can learn something in the process. Of course she also trusts the young man completely because he made her clean her plate, totally proving in the process that he’s a good guy. Two middle school girls, Kaoru and Umika, pop up in front of him, and end up activating the time bomb just in time for the police to arrive, led by an uppity female detective. Kazumi steps up to defend the guy and wishes that the bomb was a fake, to which her earrings react and leave us with confetti instead of a bang.
Umika and Kaoru then explain to Kazumi that they’re her friends and she’s been missing for the past day, and they then return to the home that they live in together. Umika explains that she’s an author, and we learn that Kaoru plays soccer, effectively establishing all the “personality” they’ll get in this volume. Kazumi displays that she apparently knows how to cook, and the female detective shows up to interrogate Kazumi, only to find herself being interrogated by the dunce of an amnesiac. Once Kazumi gets her to confess she turns into a giant monster, and Kazumi’s powers burst forth, changing her into a magical girl (after a quick bloody flashback). She easily defeats the monster and then… goes back to her normal life.
Over the course of the rest of the volume Umika and Kaoru reveal themselves as part of a magical girl team with Kazumi and teach her the ropes of fighting the giant monsters from before, called Witches, which feed on negative emotion. Along the way, Kazumi must learn to fight, as well as meet up with even more of their team, the impossibly underdeveloped characters of the Pleiades Saints, and even confront her kidnapper from the start, yet another magical girl. As the volume closes down, a mysterious Kyubey-esque creature appears on a rooftop overhead.
In Summary:
This book is just plain awful, and is probably the worst manga I’ve ever reviewed. The characters are flat and underdeveloped, the art is awful and hard to follow, and the “action” scenes take up most of the book but just plain don’t flow right. Furthermore, it doesn’t seem to follow the rules of the anime properly, and yet also jams in plot points like it expects you to have seen it, making it a bad choice both for fans of the series and those who are unfamiliar with it. Even the character designs are seem pretty slapped together, and though the book tries to throw in plenty of “fanservice” sex appeal, it’s ruined by the artist’s inability to draw something with the shape of a human body. There isn’t a single redeeming factor to this book, and as such I strongly recommend that even fans of Madoka not pick this up unless things seriously improve in later volumes, as what’s presented here is an absolutely irredeemable mess.
Content Grade: D
Art Grade: D
Packaging Grade: B+
Text/Translation Rating: C
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: June 25, 2013
MSRP: $11.99