Category: Magical Girl

Hugtto! PreCure: More is Less? Maybe?

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Warning: Spoilers for Hugtto! PreCure

hisui_icon_4040_round Truth be told I’m actually going to try to keep spoilers about Hugtto! PreCure to a minimum. The thing is I’m going to be talking about the show as a whole including the ending so spoilers are inevitable but I will try to leave some details as vague as possible because I know the length of the PreCure franchise tends to ward off all but the hardcore. At the same time, the number of very strong PreCure entries has grown to the point where people are getting more interested in the series like they have with Gundam or Jojo’s. So I have a feeling more people are going to read this out of general curiosity than the number of people who have finished the series. For them, I want to leave some sense of discovery if this makes them seek out Hugtto!

Also leaving somethings deliberately vague is thematically appropriate for this article.

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Manga of the Month: Again!!

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Again!! by Mitsuro Kubo

hisui_icon_4040_round I always wonder how much those stickers that say “From the artist who brought you Title X” help sales. Did “From the Author of Fruits Basket” help Yen Press with the sales of Twinkle Stars? Fruits Basket was one of most popular manga back in the day whereas I never hear anyone talking about Twinkle Stars. Now you can’t make a statement like mentioning a previous title will boost the sales of a new title by a fixed 46% because there are too many factors. Did the artist have one title with mass appeal that caught on but their other works are too esoteric? Will their initial audience go along with an artist if they go with a radically different direction? Are the readers burnt out on the formula of the artist’s last title? Was the initial success just a product of right time right place? Most of the time you would be foolish not to remind people of some earlier successes if you have the chance. It is a low effort way to possibly greatly increase your sales. The real question is how much is that boost with any particular title.

I mostly bring this up because I have at last one example of it working. When I went to the library I was a manga I had not heard of before. When I looked to see what it is about I saw a sticker that said, “story and art by Mitsurou Kubo the co-creator of Yuri!!! on ICE.” Now Sayo Yamamoto clearly shaped a good deal of what that anime would be but any anime is a collaborative work. The thing is Mitsurou Kubo has credits for her work on the original concept, the character designs, character names, insert song lyrics, and screenplay of all 12 episodes. She pretty much worked on everything that people liked about that show other than the animation. The sticker might as well have said, “may contain everything you liked from that ice skating show.”

So I had to see what this series is about. We go from the world of professional ice skating to time traveling oendan. You can’t say that the woman just has one story to tell with slight variations.

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Manga of the Month: Frau Faust

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Frau Faust by Kore Yamazaki

hisui_icon_4040_round It is always interesting to compare various titles by the same author. Sometimes it will be immediately obvious that two stories are by the same author to the point where you can’t imagine anyone else writing them. Other times you will be blown away when you discover that two stories have the same author. Rumiko Takahashi is a great example of this. It hardly takes a manga expert to figure of that Ranma ½ and InuYasha are by the same woman but Mermaid Saga feels very different from her normal work. But no matter where on the spectrum any pair of titles is there are usually a few subtle thumbprints that are always present in an artist’s that work can appear no matter who radically different the base story is. It is just some artists have a distinct repertoire that is unmistakable in almost anything they do whereas others are more chameleon like. Throw a rock on the internet and you will find something about the common practices of any prolific artist.

I mention this because some of the most interesting analysis can come from looking a two titles from the same artist that are fairly distinct while still having enough in common that you can also get a sense of their core style while also seeing where they tweak their formula to create a different story. For a good analysis you have to pick two titles that don’t just feel like carbon copies with different names at the top. I bring this up because I feel Frau Faust and The Ancient Magus’ Bride are two manga that are perfect for this sort of examination. While you would never mistake a chapter of Frau Faust as one from The Ancient Magus’ Bride at the same time they are both unmistakably by Kore Yamazaki. Lets look what makes these two series different from each other while still having many of the same points of appeal.

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