By Moyoco Anno
224 pages, black and white
Published by Del Rey
By now, it’s hard to have missed out on the pop culture juggernaut that was Pokemon. Even if you were fortunate enough to never see an episode of the show, or the card game, or the multiple video games, or even the movies, you’re probably still familiar with the basic concept of kids trying to collect all the different Pokemon creatures. In retrospect, I think that’s what instantly caught my attention with Sugar Sugar Rune; it took the “gotta catch em all!” attitude and gave it an interesting twist… instead it’s about two girls competing to collect boys’s hearts.
Vanilla and Chocolat are two young witches who have left the Magic World and come to Earth to be part of a competition—and the winner will become the new Queen of Magic World. All they need to do is collect the most hearts from boys, but in order to do that they first need to win the hearts. Even worse, boys in Magic World and boys on Earth are completely different, so Chocolat’s bold, in-your-face tactics that served her so well in Magic World are utterly useless here while shy Vanilla is getting hearts left and right. And of course, if either witch is unlucky enough to lose their own heart, they can never return to Magic World. This isn’t going to be as easy as it first seemed, is it?
The moment when I knew that Sugar Sugar Rune had grabbed me was probably when Chocolat suddenly realized that being a strong, confident person was going to scare off boys rather than attract them. It’s such a perfectly telling comment on adolescence and gender, with something that signals maturity and understanding yourself being exactly what boys are not looking for. As for the story itself, it’s cute and fun as we watch Chocolat fumble her way through the early stages of the competition even as it serves for a gigantic metaphor for relationships. Hearts aren’t worth set amounts, but depend on what state they were in when captured. Vanilla’s captured hearts, full of longing and wistfulness, are worth much more than when Chocolat grabs a heart through terror rather than desire. Of course, there are other obstacles in Chocolat’s way, like the mysterious student Pierre who threatens to steal her heart, but I like the fact that (at least for now) Moyoco Anno shows restraint in overusing any one problem, keeping the series varied and interesting. Even the magic system is well thought out and full of metaphors about the real world; for example, Chocolat wants to learn a spell to clean the house, but discovers that it only works if you already have put the effort in to understand where everything goes. Magic is a tool, but never a short cut in this book, be it cleaning or forming relationships. There’s literally a wealth of possibilities offered up in the basic premise of Sugar Sugar Rune, and it looks like Anno’s ready to explore them.
The art for Sugar Sugar Rune could best be described as, well, cute. In some ways it’s what people used to automatically expect from Japanese artists a decade or two ago, when translated comics were few and far between. The girls have large eyes and wispy hair, with perpetual sweet and innocent expressions on their faces. There’s more to Anno’s art than that, though. I love the baroque backgrounds drawn onto many of the pages, for example, and there’s a real sense of style in the characters (especially the flamboyant Rockin’ Robin who serves as the girls’s mentor), which is impressive when you consider that the girls spend most of their time at a school where everyone wears uniforms. Best of all, though, I love the full-page montage that occurs every time that one of the girls captures a heart. It’s got a lot of flair and style to it, and makes the event really stand out as something special.
Sugar Sugar Rune, despite its bizarre title (it’s the words that begin a number of spells), is in many ways a pretty straight-forward book. What makes it stand out is the care that’s taken by Anno in making the book’s competition a reflection of real life, as well as the little flourishes in the art. Sugar Sugar Rune makes sure that you don’t forget the book, and I’m confident based on this first volume that there’s a lot more cleverness and inventive ideas awaiting in future volumes. This is definitely recommended.
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