As we return to Witch Hat Atelier, our first title page sees our young mage bedecked in flowers, with even our adorable squirrel-caterpillar creature in attendance to celebrate the fun of an approaching festival. The intent seems clear – after the heavy, portentous drama of the last few chapters, both Qifrey and his students have clearly earned a moment of rest. Witch Hat Atelier is perfectly comfortable stretching towards fantasy action or large-scale drama, but its heart resides in the day-to-day interplay of these young witches, as both their collaborations and the manga’s distinctive realization of those actions demonstrate the inherent thrill of bettering yourself, of marching determinedly towards your next skill horizon, and of making sure to be kind to yourself and stopping to smell the roses along the way.
Tag Archives: Manga
Chainsaw Man – Volume 7
Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m happy to announce we’re returning Tatsuki Fujimoto’s phenomenal Chainsaw Man, in the wake of Denji’s brief relationship with the mysterious, murderous, and ultimately quite sympathetic Reze. Like Denji himself, Reze was both servant and victim of forces beyond her control, dancing at the whims of the arbiters of violence and capital that truly run our society. Destined to battle yet determined to maintain their humanity, the two found a precious fragment of normalcy in their mundane teenage infatuation – but of course, this is Chainsaw Man, and thus Reze was crushed by the machine just like Himeno before her, one more victim of our capitalist overlords and their slavering hellhounds.
Blue Flag – Volume 4
Seiya storms the barricades as we open Blue Flag’s fourth volume, first challenging his brother Touma on his reckless actions, then turning his barrels towards our other leads. As in his first appearance, Seiya cuts through all this adolescent anxiety like a hot knife through butter, casually dragging Taichi aside and challenging Futaba on her relationship with the pair of them in one easy gesture. When high school dramas only feature high schoolers, their perspective can get a bit myopic, naturally embracing the sense of consequence and finality that attends untested adolescent emotions. Emerging from childhood into anxious self-awareness, adolescents can naturally feel overwhelmed or paralyzed by the choices before them, seeing in each choice made an endless hall of potential doors that have all slammed painfully, permanently shut.
This is understandable; not only are they thinking about how their presentation and actions affect others’ impressions of them for basically the first time, they’re combining that understanding with the natural anxiety of high school, the first time in most of their lives where the stage after this one isn’t known or guaranteed. So they really do have the chance to screw up their lives in lasting, consequential ways, making it all the harder to make any key decisions.
Witch Hat Atelier and the Perils of Ambition
The cover of Witch Hat Atelier’s seventh volume sees Coco journeying forth with lantern in hand, charting the unknown while looking nervously over her shoulder. She has been integrated into this world so quickly it’s almost dizzying, and her magical future looks bright, but it is natural at times to feel out of sorts or floundering when you’re on a journey of discovery. Coco’s earnest desire to expand her understanding is perhaps the single greatest quality a would-be artist or craftsman can possess; for after all, the essence of the seeker is not mastery, but curiosity. Granted, endless curiosity can gradually foment endless ambition, and when your urge to know more outstrips your understanding of what you have already gained, tragedy can easily result.
Phoenix – Volume 3
Phoenix’s first volume took us back to the dawn of Japanese history, detailing the selfish ambitions and overwhelming violence of the island’s origins, how “Japan was formed as a nation through invasion, war, and slaughter.” Its second volume sped forward to the end of human history, offering a vision of the future where our shortsightedness and distrust of the Other led to the destruction of not just our species, but life on earth altogether. Though the phoenix itself embodies hope of a better way, that hope is clearly a distant one; for as Tezuka has continuously demonstrated, individual acts of charity or enlightenment cannot halt the overall tide of tribalism, indolence, and desperation for personal glory that seems to define our greater nature.
Witch Hat Atelier and the Magic of Discovery
The inside cover of Witch Hat Atelier’s sixth volume offers us a beautiful vision of undersea life, all captured through a diamond window pane as Coco stares outwards, hand pressed curiously, almost longingly against the glass. The text echoes both the magnificence of the scene and the necessity of care and confinement, stating: “The Assembly at the bottom of the sea. A bulwark to bestow witches safety, a prison to confine witches daily.” As Witch Hat Atelier has told us time and again, the unbound potential of magic means the most necessary quality of any would-be mage is restraint, an understanding that magic must be handled with care if it is to avoid inflicting more harm than it resolves. Albeit unknowingly, Coco destroyed an entire river ecosystem to save one human life – and to be frank, the fact that she didn’t understand what she was doing is no point in her favor. Humans are capable of unimaginable wonders, but ambition untethered by experience and restraint is frequently a recipe for disaster.
Blue Flag – Volume 3
The first image of Blue Flag’s third volume, presented before we even get to its opening chapter, is of Taichi and Touma playing happily as friends, captioned with “Together as children despite the differences in their interests.” It’s a moment that captures a great deal about Blue Flag – the manga’s veneration of the incidental, deeply specific moments that survive in memory and ultimately shape our perception of our own life, as well as its indifference to the superficial markers of alleged kinship or similarity that define so many adolescent relationships. No common interest could equal the bond of shared experience and sympathy connecting Taichi and Touma. The people who are most important to us are not necessarily the people who are most like ourselves – they are those who inform and expand our understanding of both ourselves and others, securing their position among those dazzling incidental fragments that encompass our life in retrospect.
Phoenix – Volume 2
The first volume of Phoenix offered a bleak portrayal of human nature, emphasizing how we are fundamentally little different from the ants and the beasts, and how our superstitious clamoring for eternal life is ultimately a self-destructive fool’s errand. Though individuals were occasionally able to rise above the small-minded perspectives and fanatical loyalties that defined them, the overall portrait of humanity was a grim one, a detailing of a species too preoccupied with personal glory to even achieve the philosophical unity with nature of animals. The only balm against this scorching condemnation was the assurance that at the very least, the events taking place were far, far before our time, a reflection of a less civilized era of humanity.
Phoenix – Volume 1
I’ll admit I know embarrassingly little about Tezuka’s life and work, beyond the obvious impact he had as both one of the pioneers of manga and the originator of TV animation. There was short-form anime before Tezuka, but it was the cutthroat bargain he struck in terms of “limited animation” that allowed anime to be in any way financially viable as a weekly television medium. And to be honest, his bargain was itself a pretty loose interpretation of “financially viable,” a labor-heavy yet nonetheless bare-bones adaptive method that still has repercussions in how animators are criminally underpaid today.
Goodnight, Punpun – Volume 3
Goodnight Punpun’s third volume begins and ends in resignation. Its front cover largely defines the drama to come: Punpun lost in a bustling crowd, just one (admittedly bird-like) face among many. In elementary school, Punpun marveled at the infinite wonder of the universe, thinking there might be a destined place for him out among the stars. In middle school, he grappled with a hyper-awareness of his own feelings, lost in the sordid anxiety of first self-consciousness. He was lonely, but he was distinct. Now he doesn’t feel like anyone at all.