On an alternate Earth where magic was discovered/rediscovered fifteen years ago, magical monsters called Kaii menace the public. Combating these monstOn an alternate Earth where magic was discovered/rediscovered fifteen years ago, magical monsters called Kaii menace the public. Combating these monsters are magical girls, young women with magitech brooms to fly on and wands that cast spells to bind and destroy the kaii. However, these wands cast preprogrammed spells or ones that magical software engineers create on the fly, so a magical girl needs a sponsor to create those spells. Thus, the profession of magical girl is backed by a number of corporations, from international giants who just have it as one of their product lines, to feisty startups working out of a converted garage.
Magilumiere is one of those startups. Led by founder Kouji Shigemoto, who is highly competent but feels more comfortable in frilly magical girl outfits than standard corporate suits, they pursue an ethic of adapting on the fly to new situations, and causing the minimum of collateral damage. On the support side, they also have painfully shy but brilliant and innovative engineer Kazuo Nikoyama, and sales/PR rep Kaede Midorikawa.
Their field agents (as of this third volume) are Hitomi Koshigaya, a young woman with some rough edges that make her seem intimidating, but is good at her job, and rookie Kana Sakuragi, who is naive but has a photographic memory.
At the beginning of this volume, Kana is shadowing Lily Aoi, a magical girl from a cosmetics company. They’re fighting a Kaii in a construction site and having some luck with water blasts. But then the monster mutates, and Aoi decides to call in assistance. This turns out to be Tsuchiba from AST, the largest of the magical girl corporations.
Tsuchiba is no-nonsense, but kind of cold, and prefers to work solo, sending the other magical girls to evacuate civilians. She is displeased when, that job completed, Kana returns to help out. The spell she uses is overwhelmingly powerful but takes a lot of set-up time. Kana protects Tsuchiba during this process, even though the other woman doesn’t want her to.
Afterwards, Tsuchiba insults Kana and her company for focusing on non-essentials like kindness and damage control. She considers these aesthetic fripperies a way of defrauding the customer. After Tsuchiba leaves, Lily shows up and talks about her own more inspirational approach to magical girl work.
Shigemoto and the cosmetics company CEO talk about the fact that Kaii mutations are becoming more common. The other company leader suggests that Shigemoto may want to communicate with Koga, the leader of AST, but Shigemoto is clearly reluctant to do so.
Then it’s time for a field trip to the Magic Industry Expo, a convention where the various companies involved with magical girls and magical girl accessories show off their wares. (Magilumiere’s too small to have their own booth.) It’s casually mentioned that men also have the ability to tap into magic, but there’s an excessive output problem and as yet there’s no technology developed enough to moderate the damage done.
The team decides to attend a presentation by Satisfac Corporation on mutation-fighting magic. This involves mutating a very weak Kaii in captivity, then subduing it. Unfortunately, the previous tests were done under controlled laboratory conditions and the stray excess magical energy from all the other exhibits causes the Kaii to mutate faster and stronger than the nurse-themed magical girl in the demonstration can handle.
The Kaii breaks free and panic ensues. Over at a booth on the other side of the exhibition hall, Koga of AST refuses to budge unless he gets a contract. AST gets paid or no action; but hey, there’s probably some idealistic fool that will take care of the problem for free.
Sure enough, Magilumiere steps up. While Shigemoto and Midorikawa work behind the scenes to get retroactive permission, Kana and Koshigaya battle the Kaii with on-the-fly programming support from Nikoyama.
They make a good team, but Nikoyama runs into a problem–his laptop simply doesn’t have the processing power to send out the new spells to the girls as fast as they need them. After we get a flashback about his past and why he joined the company, (it involves the difference between criticism and feedback), Nikoyama is able to get help from other developers using spare laptops, and the day is saved!
Koga finally shows up and tries to hire away Magilumiere’s magical girls. Not so much because he actually needs them, as that it would cripple the smaller company. The young women react appropriately, especially the feisty Koshigaya. Shigemoto refers to the shared history between him and Koga but we don’t get details right now.
It’s clear that something is up with these Kaii mutations, but that’s a mystery for next volume!
There’s a bonus comic about the difference between what Lily Aoi means her morning cosmetic routine to be, and how it often comes out in reality.
This shounen urban fantasy manga leans more towards being a workplace drama than an action series like Geobreeders. There’s effort put into thinking about legalities and corporate structure and workplace ethics. Sure, there are magical girls and monsters running around, but it’s structured through businesses. The various characters’ quirks are there for flavor rather than constant gags.
It also acknowledges that the quirkiness of the characters can sometimes get in the way of their career advancement. Nikoyama loses a school contest for programming not because his work was less good (it’s clearly the best entry if you were just looking at the result) but because he failed to trim the length to the maximum allowed.
The art is pretty good, though the monster designs are lackluster.
I understand this manga is getting an animated adaptation in fall 2024, so you might want to check that out.
Recommended to fans of urban fantasy that like verisimilitude in their settings....more
The author of the classic horror novel Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus also wrote other things. This chapbook from Union Square & Co. reprintsThe author of the classic horror novel Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus also wrote other things. This chapbook from Union Square & Co. reprints one of her short stories and an essay she wrote.
“The Mortal Immortal” is a memoir by a fictional student of Cornelius Agrippa, Winzy. While Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa was a historical person, this story riffs on a legend about one of the famous alchymist’s scholars trying to raise a foul spirit solo and getting killed in the process. In this version, the other apprentices abandoned their master in fear, and Winzy had planned to do likewise.
But Winzy was a poverty-stricken youth in love with the beautiful Bertha, who’d been adopted by their village’s richest widow and was being groomed for marriage to whichever upper crust fellow most impressed that woman. Bertha also had some affection for Winzy, but his poverty and lack of prospects caused her to push him away. Strapped for cash, he goes back to Cornelius Agrippa.
During a particularly rough patch with his sweetheart, Winzy is helping Cornelius Agrippa create a potion that the alchemist describes as “a cure for love.” Cornelius takes a nap during a crucial stage of the cooking, leaving Winzy in charge of watching. Winzy gets distracted, and when the potion smells good decides to try this “cure.” He swigs about half of it, then realizes what he’s done and drops the bottle, smashing it. The alchemist assumes that the potion exploded on its own and Winzy lets him think that.
Instead of curing Winzy’s affection for Bertha, the potion causes it to grow and fill Winzy with confidence and energy. Impressed with his improvement, Bertha abandons her potential inheritance to marry her childhood sweetie. They’re very happy together for a while.
A few years later, Cornelius Agrippa dies while trying to recreate the formula, letting slip that it was only a “cure for love” in the loosest sense. As an immortality elixir it was meant to be a cure for every ill. Winzy is now faced with more or less eternal youth while his wife grows ever older, crabbier and more decrepit.
Three centuries later, Winzy has found a gray hair. Does this mean he’s aging after all? He’s not willing to wait around to find out. He’s found a goal that will either kill him or make him famous. And there’s something even more drastic to follow.
Without the love of his life, immortality becomes hollow for Winzy. As a subplot, we learn how his eternal youth causes problems with being able to live in society. This could easily have become a novel or a series if Mrs. Shelley had wanted, but it works okay with skipping the many intervening years.
“On Ghosts” is an essay on the idea of restless spirits of the dead. Mary points out that modern (early 19th Century) society had largely discarded the monsters and mysteries of the past as civilization and technology made the world tame. But the notion of ghosts persisted.
She herself had only seen a ghost in a dream, but recounts two of her theoretically truthful friends’ accounts. One had lost a lover, and often saw her appear at night to stroke his cheek while he was drowsing, until he moved and she stopped appearing. Another had a friend commit suicide (with his gun and ammunition that he’d loaned the man!) and saw his bloody shade in a hedged lane twice. Neither had hard evidence, naturally.
The essay concludes with a somewhat less likely anecdote about the king of the cats, which Mrs. Shelley points out is probably fake, but amusing.
This is pretty mild stuff, but a good reminder that the “modern era” has been going on for much longer than most folks would credit.
If you’ve never read anything of Mary Shelley’s work but Frankenstein, this chapbook might be a good place to start, but you can also find much of it at Project Gutenberg in less stylish dress. This would, however, make a nice gift for a gothic literature fan; the packaging is deliberately designed to be a present....more
It is 1924, and the Great Kanto Earthquake has hit Tokyo. In the ruins of a lavish performance hall, the star actor awaits death. A girl comes to rescIt is 1924, and the Great Kanto Earthquake has hit Tokyo. In the ruins of a lavish performance hall, the star actor awaits death. A girl comes to rescue him, amusing to him as he is a vampire and she a mere human. Sure enough, they’re soon both trapped, until another vampire saves the pair–at least for now. But how did things get to this point?
Several years earlier, the Taisho Era of Japan was in full swing. Progress was being made on many social fronts, the Japanese were absorbing the parts of Western culture they liked, and new technologies were making life interesting. However, military adventurism was taking hold among certain elements of the armed forces and government, and there were increasing incidents of secret violence.
Rookie reporter Shirase Aoi has noticed that several recent corpses attributed to wild dog attacks are concentrated in one part of the city, and no one’s actually seen any wild dogs lately. Indeed, no one has actually seen the killings, suggesting that the perpetrator has at least some intelligence. The police laugh off her silly notions of a human(ish) murderer, as she is both a woman and works for a notorious tabloid.
Shirase, an orphan, became a reporter to uncover the truth. She understandably is suspicious of official denials since the mysterious “death” of her childhood friend Kurusu Shutaro on a mission in Siberia.
She stumbles on a trail of blood, and then runs across some suspicious-acting soldiers. They battle what appear to be vicious vampires, and when Shirase awakens the next morning, she’s told there was a movie shoot at the building last night. Riiight. She overhears a soldier talking about something called “Section Zero.”
We switch to Section Zero’s point of view. It turns out Private Kurusu is not entirely dead. He was one of two soldiers to survive a vampire attack in Siberia (90% of humans die due to incompatibility with vampire biology) and turn into a vampire himself. He was forced to join Section Zero, which fights rogue vampires and studies them to either find a cure or how to replicate them en masse as super-soldiers. The existence of vampires is, of course, a government secret.
Meanwhile, there’s a new very powerful vampire in town, one that likes the spotlight, and seems to be taking a liking to Shirase.
This manga is based on a stage musical, and was essentially done as a test bed for turning the story into an anime. As such, there are many theatrical touches.
One of the big themes is that while vampires become stronger, faster and more durable, they get a number of weaknesses that make it not a particularly good tradeoff. Losing your mind to blood thirst if you don’t get properly fed and burning in sunlight are the two big ones right away. (Religion doesn’t seem to enter in at all, these being biological vampires.) Also, there are variable levels of power given, so Kurusu is top-tier for former humans, while Major Yamagami is barely above human and would lose in a fair fight against almost any other vampire.
Also, there’s an undercurrent of grief. As far as any of the civilians know, the vampire soldiers are dead, and especially Shirase is heartbroken as Kurusu was her last emotional connection to her family.
Since I haven’t seen the anime, I don’t know exactly where this is headed beyond fighting vampires, but the opening tells us that at least three characters make it to 1924.
In the first volume, most of the characters are “types” who need more filling out; Major Yamagami is the most interesting so far because of his very human behavior and concerns. I don’t trust the general who created Section Zero one little bit as his thinking seems to be the sort that got Japan into Manchuria and China and eventually the Pacific War. Plus some folks are likely to have issues with our “heroes” basically being military police black ops.
Content note: Bloody corpses, murder. Period sexism.
It has some appealing points, but I think this one is primarily for people who want the vampire to be the hero of the story....more
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