IMAGICA=verse

When monsters are terrorizing your city, there’s only one man for the job! And by man, we mean a girl – a magical girl, to be precise. Welcome to the world of…

The Rating

The main character’s reason for becoming a magical girl is refreshingly original and believable for a comic of this genre. It’s a shame that potential is wasted on some unfortunate writing choices as the story unfolds.

The Raves

IMAGICA=verse is a magical girl comic – quite explicitly so.

Get used to the typos, by the way. They're in for the long haul.

But hey, there’s nothing wrong with being explicit in establishing your setting. In fact, the comic starts out on a high note, despite the art being amateurish. The premise is that magical girls exist in hordes, called upon to fight whatever monster threatens the city in a manner reminiscent to Power Rangers. The girls are looked up to as heroes, get ample news coverage of their battles, and have a celebrity status. They’re such a phenomenon that girls who have powers will audition what they can do before a panel of world-weary judges in order to gain some form of sponsorship.

That’s a creative and unique take on magical girls that I for one haven’t seen before. Usually, a magical girl is unique, or, at most, part of a small team of girls conveniently living within the same country and chosen by destiny. Instead, the girls are more like superheroes, and there are more of them lurking about than you can shake a magic wand at. So if not destiny, what compels our protagonist, Valencia, to take up arms?

The art isn't this comic's strength, but that traumatized stare says a lot.

As it turns out, it’s to make money and to protect her mother. Not fame, not power, and certainly not because a cute talking animal told her she has to. She’s doing it for her family, which is a far more personal reason, and one that immediately shows what drives her and where her priorities lie. To sum it up, her mother is constantly assaulted and robbed by loan sharks trying to collect on a debt Valencia's father accrued, and Valencia wants to save her. I question the wisdom of this decision, since it seems like calling the local authorities (surely there are police to deal with non-monster problems), would be smarter. Plus, the guys she works for are kind of shady and keep crucial information from her.

Less-than-wise planning aside, though, I still think it paints her as a noble character. If anything, putting herself in danger to make money and being naïve enough to trust a potential con man just shows more of what kind of person she is. Most importantly, her making the choice to fight as a magical girl, instead of being “destined,” makes all of her deeds as a magical girl meaningful to her character. It’s nice to see a comic of this genre stray from the usual clichés of the establishing plot. Unfortunately, the comic is victim to a different cliché, one from the superhero genre – the training sequence. And that’s where the comic has been spinning its wheels since.

The Razzes

The art looks like the creator learned everything from reading shoujo manga. There’s nothing wrong with that style inherently, but the anatomy is stiff and awkward, and the faces look flat. Sometimes backgrounds show decent perspective, but it has little presence or depth. The shading is applied in a sloppy fashion, with no clear light source.

Even if the art is just copying manga, that’s still a valid starting point for learning about style, character design, and visual effects. But if you really want to get good at drawing, at some point, you have to step away from manga and draw from life. I suggest beginning with some figure drawing and apply what you’ve learned to your art. Impossible you say? How can life drawing apply to cartoon-styled art? Quite well, in fact! Knowing proportions is vital to bringing a drawing to life, even if it’s not “realistic.” Here’s a video that shows the most basic shapes of the head and proportions of the face.

When you understand the shapes and proportions and apply those things to your drawings, they will have more depth to them, even though their features may be manga-like. Even if your art style isn’t realism, you can still benefit from an understanding of real anatomy and structure. For good measure, I’ll also leave you with brief guides on lighting and shadow, facial expressions, and foreshortening. These are all areas you could improve in, but with some practice, you’ll get better at them over time.

The art is, unfortunately, the least of this comic’s problems. The pacing and plot direction need so much improvement. As I said before, the story’s been mired in “training sequence” territory. One of the first major tests of her powers that we see is her trying to use some form of x-ray vision to win a game. The setup seems like the people running the game are plotting something sinister, what with the mysterious masks and a tense build-up over several pages as she hesitates to give the correct answer. The answer must lead to something important, right?

Nope. It’s a penis joke. Not even a funny joke at that, and it makes no sense since she was supposed to find the only correctly-spelled word in a box of misspelled words, and somehow the joke is that she picked the correctly-spelled word, but misread it. And all of that is followed up with more exposition on her abilities, instead of showing her learning to use them in a real confrontation. As a matter of fact, show, don't tell is a prevalent issue with the writing throughout this comic, even at its best. So what is the difference between telling and showing? Here's a tongue-in-cheek example.

Credit to Anthony Clark for this image.

Indeed, some exposition is necessary to tell a story, but readers will be even more engaged if they learn about something by seeing it happen, rather than having it explained. Instead of giving a verbal primer on how a magical girl's power works, how about just showing them do it? It's not always necessary to explain the specifics of how it works, either, as long as it's portrayed consistently. Something to consider the next time you want to have your protagonist try a new type of magic.

The supporting cast isn't written all that well either. I find Valencia to be a likeable, heroic girl, although easily manipulated, but most everyone else seems flat. Her mother, although loving and gentle, acts a little too passive and calm for somebody in her situation, and her siblings don't seem to play much of a role beyond yet another one of the things Valencia takes responsibility for. It does make her look good, but it also makes her mother look like a less capable parent. It would be nice to see these characters fleshed out more, show how the mother raises her children, and perhaps show the siblings' reactions to the situation. How does it affect them seeing their mother's arm broken by loan sharks? Are they afraid? Angry? Worried? Were they really so easily fooled by Valencia's verbal backtracking after she let slip where her money is coming from, or are they hiding their concern or simply overlooking it because they don't understand the risk? What will they do once they do understand? If family is going to be at the heart of her motivation, answering these kinds of questions is important. In order to show how strong the family bond is, you need to show who these people are and how they care for each other. It's not enough to just show Valencia's role in it.

As for her mentor figures, Derek and Isaac, they don't seem to have a role beyond dumping exposition, whether it's to Valencia or between themselves. They have a nasty habit of delivering exposition dumps to the audience about things she really ought to know, but for some reason they don't feel the need to tell her.

With mentors like these, who needs enemies?

Isaac is usually portrayed as the nicer one, but really, their roles in the story is interchangeable. They spend a lot of time talking about how special and unique Valencia is because she apparently wasn't born a magical girl but became one later (which she is unaware of for some reason), and this makes her powers even more extraordinary than usual. For all the kudos I give the beginning of the comic for avoiding the cliché of the magical girl being chosen by destiny, this comic really seems to want to veer right back into that territory the further it goes on. And that's a bit disappointing.

The Revue

The writing has so many problems. The one thing the comic does well is it gives the main character a very solid motivation and personality. Even though her decisions aren’t particularly smart, she’s so well-meaning and self-sacrificing that it’s hard to not want her to succeed. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to carry the comic. The art, the pacing and delivery, and character development really hold it back.

Sunday Revue May 22nd: Robotto Jukujo

Ladies and Gentlemen...

In the left corner weighing in at 3 tons we got Gaiko King...

In the right corner with his giant spiral... Lancelot...

...Let's get ready to Ruuumble! 

I'm guessing this is Robot-mom in her fighting form.

Robotto Jukujo by Nemo tells the tale of Tomodachi, who wants to put together a pit crew and build a fighting robot to take on the likes of Gaiko King. He's a tantrum-throwing dork with huge ambitions and the will to make it happen.

Rating

Raves

One of my favorite bits in this comic, and I wish there was more of it, was the interaction between Robot-mom and the toaster oven. In that scene, mom thinks she's showing signs of depression -- it seems like she's having your classic existential AI crisis: a machine wanting to be human, and she confides to the cat-shaped toaster.

I think it's clever and hilarious that the toaster-neko burns his responses to mom on pieces of toast and pops them out. I don't know where he reloads the toast from, but it doesn't matter to me, I still think it's funny, and if anything I would have loved more of those two hashing out her existential crisis through a loaf of wonderbread. Mom's story seems much more interesting than Tomo's. She spots Tomo's Youtube clip of Gaiko King and Lancelot fighting a match and it seems to light a fire in her, but it's never really followed up in a way that's empowering or freeing to Robot-mom.

The art in the first chapter of Robotto is great looking as well -- both the color pages and manga b/w ones. In the second half it appears that the artist changed, but I'm not sure. The style definitely changes. We go from a more mainstream manga look to something that's heavily stylized and a bit sloppy at times, but the bigger change is that it's in color whereas chapter 1 isn't.

I like the robot design for Gaiko King in the first chapter as well.

Gaiko King is on the left.

Razzes

One of the biggest issues I had with Robotto was how it flipped-flopped in the reading direction.

Since Robotto tries to emulate a manga, it's read right-to-left (like how the Japanese read a comic), but coming into it, I was reading it left-to-right.

So I read the narration of page 1 in this order:

Panel 1: "There was a time when robots were slaves."
Panel 2: "Where man and machine lived day by day"
Panel 3: "Neo-Don Lon, Capital of Neo-Gen Land"

In the direction I read the panels, it made sense. Looking back at the paneling though, it makes more sense that the panel on the right is the establishing shot and then you backwards 'Z' through the 4-mini panels on the left side, but I wasn't being to conscious of how I was reading it, so I didn't pick up on that the first time. The narration text, regardless of which direction you read it makes sense, because they're three individual statements that can be ordered in any direction.

In fact, it wasn't till page 9 before I picked up on which direction to read Robotto. Yes, page 7, does clearly establish the mother on the right side, but I still didn't register it. In page 8, the conversation seemed backwards and muddled, but I soldiered on.

Page 9 gave me incontrovertible proof that I was reading the entire manga wrong.

Tomo winds up and punches and then falls, and it's a sequence of frames that only makes sense going in one direction, and I went back through and re-read the previous pages.

So, this is definitely a presentation problem. New readers may get confused or lost in those first 9 pages and that may be enough to have them click off the comic.

I think this problem can be easily fixed with a page that tells you which direction to read the manga. If you ever pick up manga at the bookstore, there's usually a page telling you which direction to start reading so you don't end up reading the end before the beginning.

Unfortunately, this isn't the end of all these presentation issues. On page 52, this happens:

There's an establishing shot of the tool Troy is going to pick up (panel 1), then he picks it up (panel 2), and then lastly he's holding it and uses it on Robot-mom. It only makes sense going in one direction, and that's left-to-right, unlike the rest of the comic, which has been read right-to-left. There's an inconsistency in which direction you have to read this comic furthering the confusion.

Presentation aside, I unfortunately, didn't find the story all that interesting. Partially due to my disinterest in mecha anime, but mostly due to the long wind-up Robotto has. We spend a great deal of time meeting characters, but it isn't till the second chapter when we start getting some traction on the core of the story, but by then the story's gone on hiatus -- the last pages were in January 18, 2016. If the comic does come back, it definitely needs more Robot-mom and Toaster.

Tomo is the main character, but I didn't find him compelling and he acted like a toddler at times. He throws a tantrum by stomping on the tabletop during breakfast and later he coldly bats a platter of hamburgers out of his Robot-mom's hand. If it's to establish his Type-A personality (similar to Haruhi Suzumiya) it might work in that context, but it pulled me out of story when he acted out. Am I supposed to see it as comedy? Is he a little brat? I have a feeling it's a bit of both, but it didn't sit right with me. A better example of Tomo acting to his character type is the scene where he gets Troy to come over for dinner, and even his antics getting his Robot-mom to come to the garage so they can dismantle her. He's the guy with all the ideas, and he'll do whatever it takes to implement them, and those two scenes showed that the best.

The main character's full name is Tomodachi. I know it means "friend" in Japanese, and it seems odd to me that it's also his actual name. Can "tomodachi" be a name? I don't mean to be snotty about it -- I know about ten Japanese words so I'm hardly an authority despite reading and watching a lot of Japanese pop-media.

Revue

If you're a fan of mecha then check out Robotto Jukujo, but it's all wind up and very little pay off for the time being.