The hotly anticipated sequel to QQ Sweeper is here now!
Creative Staff:
Story/Art: Kyousuke Motomi
English Adaptation: Ysabet Reinhardt MacFarlane
Translation: JN Productions
Touch-Up Art & Lettering: Mark McMurray
Design: Julian [JR] Robinson
Editor: Amy Yu
What They Say:
Fumi Nishioka lives with Kyutaro Hirikita and his family of “Sweepers,” people who specialize in cleaning the minds of those overcome by negative energy and harmful spirts. Fumi has always displayed mysterious abilities, but will those powers be used for evil when she begins to truly awaken as a Queen?
As Fumi’s dangerous new powers blossom, Kyutaro might be the only one who can help her keep them under control. Then, when Kyutaro tells Fumi that he’ll never leave her side, she unexpectedly starts to fall for him!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
I re-read QQ Sweeper in preparation for reviewing this newest volume of Queen’s Quality (though there’s probably another new volume out already; I’m pretty bad at keeping up with releases). I forgot how much I liked this comic. It’s cute, it’s charming, and it’s really touching. It’s just a great manga about accepting yourself, even though Kyutaro and Fumi seem to not have really done that themselves.
A little bit of the third volume really hit on a flaw of human nature, which I thought was very prescient. Fumi’s classmates turn their heads when she’s being bullied, except the couple friends she has. Fumi waves it all off because she’s been through this before, and knows nothing she does will make the situation better. But when Fumi is absolved by the Fortune Teller-but-actually-Bug Handler, they’re suddenly like “I knew you were innocent all along.” Watch human nature at work, disinclined to step up against bullying, bigotry, and prejudice and act as if they were the ones who were on the right side of history the whole time. That was just a really good piece of commentary, intentional or not on the part of Motomi, that I really loved.
This first volume of Queen’s Quality opens with a reintroduction of sorts, with Fumi narrating the key points of QQ Sweeper and her life at the moment. Enough that I think just jumping into this series would be fine, though I definitely recommend going back to QQ Sweeper because it’s good.
This series seems to be focused in on the idea of the queen, which was dropped in on the third volume of QQ Sweeper. Seemingly gone are the volume-long stories of Fumi and Kyutaro solving the solving the problems of individuals, and that’ll be really missed. Short stories like those are what allow for a deep dive into character, of which I am most interested.
That is not to say that the story bits of Queen’s Quality are boring, but it does feel like a sudden tonal shift, and one that I wasn’t particularly expecting. It gets dark. In the opening pages, Fumi’s queen qualities are brought to the fore by a doctor that specializes in hypnosis and memory loss. He does this to see the queen first hand, though he’s almost made to burn himself because of his mischief.
Later in the volume, the queen comes out again after a teacher stricken with the bugs and controlled by the bug controller of QQ Sweeper smacks Fumi across her head with a camera. All after tormenting another student with the very same camera. This time, Fumi almost goes too far into being the queen. She makes the teacher kneel and forces her not to blink, only to be saved by her partner and guardian(?), Kyutaro. He is seemingly the only one who can snap Fumi back from her queen state.
This is not what I was expecting from the first volume of a new series, though I suppose I put myself in the wrong mindset. It really is the fourth volume of a series based on the progression of the story. And the tonal shift is still jarring, but not unexpected. They had been setting this up in the dichotomy of the good queen and the bad queen, even anecdotally.
I can’t imagine this manga lasting for more than a few more volumes after this, just with the pace it seems to be going at, but it’s going to be a really solid ride until then.
In Summary:
I really, and unexpectedly, liked QQ Sweeper a lot, and it ended rather abruptly so I’m glad it’s getting this sequel. The first volume of Queen’s Quality delivers the natural escalation of the story I wanted, though it was clear that I was not expecting it. Given this volume though, I’m much more excited to see what direction this goes rather than the very good volume-long stories that were going on. A larger story gives the reader something more to latch onto.
Content Grade: B+
Art Grade: B
Packaging Grade: B
Text/Translation Grade: A
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Viz Media
Release Date: September 5, 2017
MSRP: $9.99
