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Manga Thoughts: Witch Hat Atelier 5
At the start of last month I’d read the last of the new manga I’d found and bought just before the area bookstore closed. While the volume-a-day pace I’d reached at the start of the year had brought me to the point of dipping into the piles “waiting until I’d seen the anime” before things had got that serious, I was still faced with just how to get more and the unfortunate awareness that if that was something I was dwelling on, I was a lot better off than a lot of people.
As I’d weighed all my options against each other, though (with my manga-reading speed slowing quite a bit), a comics shop I’d sometimes trekked into the big city to sample the wide-ranging shelves of managed to get an online store set up. With ordering and paying thus simplified, I resolved to support a (fairly) local business and ordered a boxful of manga. Once the courier had dropped it off on my doorstep, I transferred it to my garage and left it sitting for days with vague thoughts that was safer, but at last I nerved myself to open the box and continue a series that had risen in my estimation all through its first four volumes, Kamome Shirahama’s thoroughly attractive and interestingly plotted Witch Hat Atelier. (I did notice that this time the back cover blurb is no longer written in verse, though.)
Picking up from the cliffhanger the fourth volume had left off on, the characters were scattered among various crises, and resolving those problems might have felt a bit scattered too to begin with. As the characters collected again, though, the story picked up for me. While I don’t think of the series as “action,” there was a good dose of it where the mentors got to be impressive and the apprentices found their own ways to pitch in. There was also a startling revelation about one of the “Brimmed Caps,” the mysterious lurking figures who have been nudging along the main character Coco’s story from the start with dark allusions to “changing sides.” Things did wrap up at the end of the volume, but there’s a next step established that could mean building new complications whenever the next instalment of the story is available. I at least know a bit more how I might get that forthcoming volume.
As I’d weighed all my options against each other, though (with my manga-reading speed slowing quite a bit), a comics shop I’d sometimes trekked into the big city to sample the wide-ranging shelves of managed to get an online store set up. With ordering and paying thus simplified, I resolved to support a (fairly) local business and ordered a boxful of manga. Once the courier had dropped it off on my doorstep, I transferred it to my garage and left it sitting for days with vague thoughts that was safer, but at last I nerved myself to open the box and continue a series that had risen in my estimation all through its first four volumes, Kamome Shirahama’s thoroughly attractive and interestingly plotted Witch Hat Atelier. (I did notice that this time the back cover blurb is no longer written in verse, though.)
Picking up from the cliffhanger the fourth volume had left off on, the characters were scattered among various crises, and resolving those problems might have felt a bit scattered too to begin with. As the characters collected again, though, the story picked up for me. While I don’t think of the series as “action,” there was a good dose of it where the mentors got to be impressive and the apprentices found their own ways to pitch in. There was also a startling revelation about one of the “Brimmed Caps,” the mysterious lurking figures who have been nudging along the main character Coco’s story from the start with dark allusions to “changing sides.” Things did wrap up at the end of the volume, but there’s a next step established that could mean building new complications whenever the next instalment of the story is available. I at least know a bit more how I might get that forthcoming volume.