krpalmer | Entries tagged with witch hat atelier

Seeing a release date for the thirteenth volume of Kamome Shirahama’s Witch Hat Atelier manga had at once been as welcome as ever and given me the peculiar feeling it had shown up earlier than I might have expected. Willing to hope, I put in an order anyway a little in advance of the date. As it turned out, I was then able to pick up the volume a little sooner than I’d expected to. This time, I didn’t “save the best for last.”
( Catching a breath and speeding up again )

Noticing some unfortunate, yet still somehow understandable, suspicions of how long the upcoming Witch Hat Atelier anime would “hold together” did get me thinking back to those just as unfortunate cracks that “the trailer’s always the best part of the movie” and the days of OVAs (although I can now think of a few OVAs that didn’t “hold together,” or indeed even reach their concluding instalment). At a certain point, a sort of premature bargaining had me wondering whether there might be an early point in the manga where, should the anime be fortunate enough to “hold together” even that far, you could “cut off there” with some measure of satisfaction. I took the first volume of the manga off my shelves and thought that getting to the moment where Coco is given her witch hat would work for me. Then, I kept reading through the other eleven volumes of manga I have.
( Putting the pieces together again )

As time passed I grew a bit conscious I hadn’t jumped into the twelfth volume of Witch Hat Atelier after receiving my copy (the pages of which had an odd “splay” to them, as if the page signatures this paperback might have been glued together from were still sort of sticking together at their other ends rather than losing their identity in a single book). Some sort of familiar “save the best for last” feeling had engaged, perhaps. One thing that might have helped there, however unfortunate from another perspective, was that I’d lost the nerve to see how Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End continued beyond its anime adaptation, and that with no immediate announcement of a continued adaptation as far as I can remember. (I have multiple volumes of Urusei Yatsura and My Dress-Up Darling waiting in a similar fashion, so far as that goes.)
( A plot zig-zag )

With the strength of my interest in Kamome Shirahama’s Witch Hat Atelier manga, I did get to thinking I was dallying on getting a copy of its eleventh volume. Once I did have a copy, I took it out of my “waiting to be read” pile ahead of a few titles that had been there longer. Picking it up I was conscious it felt a little thinner than the average manga volume, and at a certain point reading it I might have been dwelling on a few small “cartoony reaction faces,” but all the rest of the art, and the unfolding story, wound up catching me up in it again. In general I’ve been reading through my manga a bit faster in recent weeks than I’d come to the point of before, but I just about inhaled this latest volume.
( Drawing on experience )

When it came to the latest volume of Kamome Shirahama’s Witch Hat Atelier manga, I didn’t quite let “the manga that’s been waiting the longest should be picked out of the pile next” altogether determine when I got around to it. I did, though, read the sixteenth volume of a different “magical” manga, Kore Yamazaki’s The Ancient Magus’ Bride, right before Witch Hat Atelier. Continuing the “magical academy arc” of The Ancient Magus’ Bride, I have to admit to an initial uncertain thought or two as to whether I was losing track of all of the new characters. In the end, though, I did find that latest instalment interesting, even if I remained eager to move on to a still more fantastic world.
( Along many paths )

Not carving a lot of time out of recent days to read manga, it took me a while to get around to the ninth volume of Witch Hat Atelier. It might have been a little more prominent than usual in my mind as I worked my way through some other recent titles. Beyond my familiar interest in Kamome Shirahama’s artwork and story, the ninth volume’s cover could have done something to get my attention. The blue-grey of the hats and cloaks of Coco and her fellow apprentices had predominated before among the equally subdued shades of other characters’ clothing, but here it had been replaced by the red and black of a “Knights Moralis,” the enforcers of the rules upright witches place on themselves and impose in secret on others.
( It’s not all ominous, but... )

As I worked my way through a shipment of manga (but not the latest shipment I’ve received), I wound up saving the eighth volume of Witch Hat Atelier for last, hoping to enjoy Kamome Shirahama’s artwork again and find interest in the unfolding story. The last volume had left off with the promise of a great magical festival. Tartah, the boy witch introduced back in the third volume (and promoted from the back cover there to the front cover here), first mentioned the festival but wound up having to spend the night at the atelier. When he offers to get a feel for just how Coco holds a spell-casting pen before carving one for her, there’s one of those moments where one character comes to an embarrassed realization but the other remains oblivious. I have to admit to having had a few “this sort of thing can be a bit more obvious than when the two characters are the same sex, isn’t it?” thoughts, and then thinking again of how wearying relentless insistences towards both mixed-sex “shipping” and same-sex “slashing” can get for me.
( Another return )

Trying to stay aware of upcoming manga releases, I took special note of the approach of the seventh volume of Kamome Shirahama’s Witch Hat Atelier. Once I’d received a copy of it, though, I did let it sit waiting for a month. A certain amount of “trying to work through previously accumulated bits of other series” was mixed with still grappling with uneasy uncertainties about “when is it safe to handle anything brought in from outside” (and mostly letting something like sheer, “eventually I can touch it” laziness deal with the matter). I did notice the front cover had returned to the main character Coco, if now with her “brushbuddy” mascot-type critter companion, and sported logos for winning Eisner and Harvey Awards (which has me contemplating what kind of “comics” I read and what kinds I brush by, and the appearance of officially translated manga in the “black and white comics boom” of the late 1980s).
( Explanations and complications )

The sixth volume of Kamome Shirahama’s Witch Hat Atelier manga is the second in the series I’ve had shipped to my doorstep, and did sit around for several days before I started reading it. I read it with continued interest, all the same, and got through it faster than I’ve been managing with most other manga these days (not quite at the point where I need to “ration new volumes out.”)
( “And your task... is to use your magic to surprise me!” )

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.)
( Some magical semi-specifics )

Managing to say something about the first three volumes of a new manga series just might threaten to set a pattern. I was certainly pleased to see the fourth instalment of Kamome Shirahama’s Witch Hat Atelier show up, but did find myself trying to articulate my reactions even as I sped through it, pulled along by the story. One of those first reactions, though, just might have been wondering if I was starting to take the manga’s art a bit more for granted.
( As for the story... )

Being able to read the first two volumes of the Witch Hat Atelier manga in rapid succession had a good impact on me, but waiting for the third volume to resolve the second’s cliffhanger did stretch out a bit. Once I did have a copy of that third volume, though, it was easy to get caught up again in Kamome Shirahama’s gorgeous artwork. As for the story, the cliffhanger did get resolved pretty fast after the young apprentice Coco’s spell getting away on her put her once more at risk of her memories being erased; trying to sort out just what happened keeps her mentor Qifrey in various complications over the volume, though.

Qifrey is on the front cover this time, but the back cover shows Coco and Tartah, the boy assistant of a magical inkmaker briefly introduced in the first volume. I’ll admit to remembering when the Little Witch Academia anime series introduced a male character and some people got very indignant at the thought of this interfering with slashing that series’s main character Akko with her rivals and/or roommates; still, I’ll also admit to not dwelling too much on “possibilities” in general and found the friendship in this volume pleasant. Tartah does turn out to have his own built-in complication, a sort of colourblindness that seems to leave him aware of the great secret of magic but struggling to use it himself. (There’s no easy magical solution for this; part of keeping magic under control is rules to not cast spells on people themselves.) There’s less of a cliffhanger with this volume than with the first two, but the larger story keeps ticking along unbeknownst to Coco; hopefully, the wait for the next volume will go easier.

At the start of May, I managed to head to the nearest comics shop for “Free Comic Book Day.” Requested to take only so many of the promotional pamphlets, I found myself most drawn all the same to the ones advertising for manga publishers. The Viz pamphlet excerpted a recent chapter of “My Hero Academia,” although not the “here’s where you can start, however late you may now be” point I admit I’d been hoping for. On a different note, however, the pamphlet from Kodansha did get me noticing a new title called “Witch Hat Atelier.” It wasn’t until the start of the next month, though, that I did manage to see and buy the first volume of that series from the area bookstore. However, this did mean it wasn’t that long before the second volume showed up, and that just added to the impressiveness of the first.
( The details of magic )