About the Mangaka

Sadly nothing available on Watase Nozomi, according to ANN this is her only work. If you have any info please drop me a line through the Contact Me page.

About the Manga

I was a bit disappointed this was only a two volume series, given the fact it’s an adaptation of a twenty-six episode anime. It would have been easy I would have thought to make it three or four volumes long.

Nozomi’s art is exactly like that of the anime, which took me a bit by surprise. There’s usually some very severe differences between the two. Also the story flows the same, this again took me by surprise.

That’s not to say there aren’t changes, because there are, presumably because it’s only two volumes long a lot of things are removed and a few scenarios changed.

I have to admit that while I enjoyed the first volume, it was the second that got me. Nozomi manages to pull some excellent emotions out throughout the conclusion of the story.

The flow, while fast perfect, and the ending while different from the anime, is a good one. Usually double volume series like this one have a weak ending, but this one was rather enjoyable.

Tokyopop have sadly let this series lapse into OOP! which sucks, especially since the anime is about to be re-released. In this situation a surge in the demand for the manga is not unexpected.

They handled this one pretty well considering their other releases of the time. There were no overly westernised characters (no one running around saying ‘dude’ every other sentence). The translation is smooth and feels right. However they have a huge problem with off-side guttering. Rather than the gutter problem being on the spine side, in this series it’s on the other side, the page edge. Several times they cut off part of the speech bubbles cutting upwards of half the text off. This is a shame, since it would of been a perfect series without this.

I still add this to my Essential Read list, because i genuinely feel it’s worth buying.

Where to buy

Sadly, this series is now OOP! (Out of Print!) and as such is damned hard to get. However several places do still carry some stock.

In the UK, you’re only going to get them from specialist stores that may have old stock still lying around. Amazon.co.uk Market Place has a few copies floating around. The Americans and Canadians have a better and cheaper time of it however.

Volumes One and Two from Amazon.com. Volume one is selling for $0.06 and Volume Two for $0.68, and no I didn’t get the prices wrong!!.

Volumes One and Two from Amazon.ca. Volume one is going for CDN$5.11 and Volume two for CDN$5.59