Review: Shugo Chara, vol. 1
This wasn’t an advance reader’s copy (more’s the pity) but as readers of the Del Rey Manga Newsletter might have noted, it was still free: I won a random drawing and UPS dropped off a rather unexpected copy of Shugo Chara earlier this week. (I say unexpected because I myself only skimmed the April newsletter and kind of missed my own name in it.) So here’s the disclaimer: if you think it skews the bias, take the “free” part into account.
Shugo Chara, vol. 1
Published by: Del Rey Books
Story and Art by Peach-Pit (Banri Sendo & Shiguko Ebara)
208 (190) pages.
Original Language: Japanese
Orientation: Right to left
Vintage: 2006. US edition April 2007.
Translation: June Kato
Adaptation: David Walsh
Lettering: North Market Street Graphics
Publisher’s Rating: Teen, ages 13+
Rating: 3 out of 5
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Premise: A wish from your heart to be more than what you seem on the outside can take the form of a “guardian character” — small, cute guardians who can give you skills, confidence, or even powers you didn’t know you had.
Synopsis:
Amu Hinamori is the coolest kid in the fourth grade at Seiyo Elementary. At least, that’s how it looks on the outside. But inside she’s just a shy kid who still isn’t sure what’s she’s supposed to be or how to act with other people. And then one morning, she wakes up to find three colourfully painted eggs in her bed, and soon discovers that inside each egg is a Guardian Character, an aspect of herself as she would like to be.
With her new-found abilities, Amu should be happy — but she doesn’t like the sudden changes or being pulled pulled in so many new directions, and though she’s told these are all aspects of who she could be, she doesn’t quite believe that yet either.
There are some other important plot points, but let’s break those down in the review:
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Review:
The rating (please flip your copy of the book over to look at the back cover) is 13+. Let me start with the most obvious disconnect: the main character is 11. She’s about to enter fifth grade, so she’s going to be 12, but there’s no way she’s older than that. The story does have certain appeal no matter what your age, but I personally would peg the target demographic as the kids who are buying the Hannah Montana albums. (That’s 10 or 11, or younger… for those of you who just said “who?”)
My guess would be that Del Rey maybe doesn’t have a lower age rating? (Or didn’t want to use one.) I just feel that this title may have a little trouble finding an audience. Some fans of Peach-Pit will buy the first one, but this is different enough from DearS and Rozen Maiden that I’m not sure of the overlap there.
The story is about a young girl, who feels phony in how she dresses and the act she puts on for others, but who manages to find new aspects of herself with the help of übercute chibi Guardian Characters (the Shugo Chara of the manga title). But sometimes change is hard, and we can’t always be sure what we want. This is even more true in Amu’s case, as the effects of not one but three meddling guardians often lead to more complications, rather than happily ever after. Sure, suddenly it seems she can do anything but when she comes back to normal she can be embarrassed by what she did or said when a guardian was helping her to be “more herself”.
By itself, that premise would work pretty well, and we could follow Amu as she grows as a person and discovers things about her character and “characters” through the modest challenges of various school activities. It would have been a nice (if saccharine) slice-of-life comic.
What we have grafted on to that baseline is first, a shoujo drama about the student council (perhaps confusingly referred to as the School Guardians). Amu is selected to be a member of the School Guardians, and there she meets a new friend Nadeshiko Fujisaki, the VP. The President is the cute Tadese Hotori, whom Amu has a huge crush on. The gimmick for the council is that they are named after playing cards: Tadase holds the King’s or “K” Chair, Nadeshiko is the Queen’s or “Q” Chair, and similarly there are positions for Jack and Ace (unlike say, poker, the ranking here appears to be K-Q-J-A). The School Guardians are held in high esteem by other students, which is odd because it doesn’t seem like they do much but have tea parties.
If we were to follow this plot line we’d have a mostly harmless bit about adapting to new roles, & learning how to deal with first loves and crushes while staying best friends forever with the new gal pal, and given the ages of the characters it would all be very cute and chaste, with maybe a first kiss (on the cheek, of course) and some heavy handholding.
Overlayed on top of that however, is the shades-of-Card-Captor-Sakura mystic quest element. The Guardian Characters are born of eggs. Each person’s heart has an egg, though as people get older the egg and it’s character sort of fade away, unused. Some eggs are good, but some (X eggs, in the comic) are bad and could change the character of their owner into something darker.
The School Guardians, like Amu, all have Guardian Characters (though they just have one each) and part of their mission is to hunt down bad eggs and seal them, or destroy them if things really get out of hand. Amu is very special to have three Guardian Characters, so of course the School Guardians want her to join them to help seal the bad eggs, while also searching for the mysterious Embryo (an egg that can grant any wish) before a rival, presumably evil cabal finds it first.
Amu has already had run ins with this other group as one of their agents, the wily catboy Ikuto, had tried to steal Amu’s eggs before they hatched. Though of course Ikuto is also pretty (though dark, where Tadase is blond) and the way he is behaving toward Amu is absolutely scandalous.
It would be hard to imagine how all this could be more complicated. The three plots are tightly wound together, so a single scene or action beat often serves to advance all three at once, but it still took 190 pages to just introduce characters and concepts, and we didn’t even get the main plot device running (bad eggs, gotta catch ‘em all) until 10 pages from the end. Of course the story ends on a cliffhanger.
The art is great, and despite the plot is part of what raises my overall rating, though with a caveat. The character designs, the wardrobes, the fact that each important character is going to have at least one cute pint-sized sidekick… you might guess where this is going. If you were a fan of the cute & sweet side of CLAMP, or of chibi-fests like Snow Fairy Sugar or Di Gi Charat, then you will be able to enjoy this more than a fan of, say, western comics or most other manga.
This isn’t my cup of chai, but I can recognize a well done example even if I don’t particularly like the genre; 3 marks out of 5.
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Check out the art for yourself: Del Rey has an eight page preview.
