Summer Manga 2022: Midsummer Mermaids

Once again… it’s that time of year… the changing of the seasons, and thus the changing of the MAL challenge stacks. This time around, our seasonal theme was mermaids- and man, it was a mixed bag. Reading stuff from the early 2000s always kicks the shit out of me; you’d think I’d have nostalgia for it, but No. At least there was some cool stuff too? Anyway. I actually typed out a longer and more interesting introduction a few days ago but lost it, and that put me off from finishing this for a bit. But! It’s here now! I finished it! Let’s dive in!


Abyss Azure no Zainin

A poppy, sweet drama centered on a very determined mermaid doing her very best to support her friend's star-crossed romance with a human man. Refreshingly pretty art, cool lore... Our mermaid midsummer was off to such a strong start with this one...

Since this is still ongoing, it's a bit difficult to pass a complete judgment on the plot; so far, I've found it compelling and paced very well. I vaguely fear there will be a love triangle in the future, my bane of banes, but I trust the mangaka enough that if that comes up, it'll be handled well.

High recommend, including for readers who don't normally read romance. A shining star of this list.


Angel's Hill

One of two classic Tezuka manga on the list. Full disclosure, I've read Angel's Hill before- way back when I was sixteen, first getting into manga seriously. I read a slate of Tezuka stuff- I don't remember how I picked what I did, because it was like... Angel's Hill, MW, and Adolf no Tsugu.

I actually didn't remember the second half of this at all, which is kind of weird because the second half is where it gets kind of weird.

Anyway, I appreciate Tezuka's weirdly classical sense of story telling, how he weaves together mythology with contemporary topics like corporate greed. Angel's Hill starts off with fantasy countries, goes to Japan, has modern technology and Greek Gods all in one setting. It's all spaghetti'd everywhere. Which makes sense, because he was the first person who did a lot of the things he did; there was really no set precedent, barely any real genre standards.

All that said, I have a hard time recommending Angel's Hill out of the context of its place in the halls of classic manga. It has a strange and vaguely racist slavery subplot in the beginning, the plot meanders in a way best suited for serialization and not connected volumes, the ending is a bit on the weak side, with some plot critical elements are only introduced in the last two chapters.


Aoi Urako to Suna no Machi

Though this title has pretty, floaty art and very nice panelling, I honestly have difficulty with it, since the plot is rather weak and not quite memorable for me. It falls into a very specific niche of storytelling where the ending twist is just like, disappointing, and doesn't bring forth some sort of greater emotional understanding.

I suppose it might land with some people, it just didn't work for me. It's short enough I would recommend it for people who like coming of age stories.


Coral: Tenohira no Umi

I love Tono, and I was actually already reading this before the summer list was announced. The manga itself is complete, but the translation is ongoing, so I have yet to finish it.

That said, I think this is probably one of the best longer manga from Tono, and I would highly recommend it as an introduction to her body of work.

Delicately illustrated, Coral follows a young girl in a hospital who creates an imaginary world of mermaids, paralleling the fantastical lives of the mermaids with the protagonist's hospital stay and life as a whole. It veers between candy-sweet and cloyingly cynical, whimsy matched with kitchen sink. It is a tightly told story that wanders through the lives of people facing crushing uncertainty and unhappiness.

Highly recommended.


Hekikai no AiON

Prefacing this with: I have a bias. A very severe bias. I hate 2000s bishoujo stories with a burning passion. I hate moe melty eyes. I hate harems and harem comedies. Therefore I hate a solid 70% of AiON.

That said;

I also cannot stop thinking about the sadder, more melancholy parts of AiON. It managed to move some sense of sentimentality within me. Despite being as cliché as it is, I did come to care for the main character, and a particular scene with the mermaids (which is super spoilery, so I won't divulge it here) was actually very deep and hard hitting.

I wouldn't recommend it unless you have the exact opposite sense of taste as me and love 2000s bishoujo harem comedies. There's a nice bitter, tragic edge to this one that sets it apart from the rest for me.


Kaijuu no Kodomo

Masterpiece!

Well, a very beautiful masterpiece that is ultimately a very thorough examination of a very mundane idea; the circle of life.

Igarashi's art is gorgeous and lanky, emotive, drenched in seawater. The ensemble cast revolves around, many disparate viewpoints and standalone accounts all brought to embody one whole.

I can't recommend it enough. It has body to it, a literary quality that sets it apart. It's rare to find stories with a focused intellectual depth in manga these days. Like, I love my garbage, but this is a breath of fresh air.


Kaikisen

Following up a masterpiece with... Something that maybe, probably, could be a masterpiece! With a few tweaks and twinges.

It's very very good, really. Satoshi Kon's first completed serialization, with a very tight (almost too formulaic) story and spectacular art.

It's difficult to say anything about it except that it's really good, really. It feels like it could've been a movie- maybe a bit too cinematic for my taste, is the problem? Seraphim (Satoshi Kon's unfinished collaboration with Mamoru Oshii) was much stranger and more disjointed, which I think lent it a bit more flavor.

I do recommend it, though. Simply not a creative personality you can go wrong with.


Maigo no Kemono-tachi

Okay. See. Look at this.

I mentioned earlier that I hate that 2000s moe look, and that kind of really extends to... a lot of late 90s, 00s works in general. That have those big huge giant saucer eyes and stickbug thin bodies.

And my God. Look at this thing. It's hideous all the way through. The plot is thinner than the paper it's printed on, and the worldbuilding is nonsensical. It's difficult to like. I think that even people who like this aesthetic might have trouble enjoying this.

Not recommended!!


Mermaid Prince

So, a fun fact. There are actually two titles on this list titled Ningyo Ouji, and so to differentiate them, I'm calling this one (the inferior one) by the English title.

This is another title I find difficult to like.

It's overly saccharine, relies on secondhand embarrassment for a lot of the humor, has multiple contrived plot points, and skirts being yaoi-esque without actually committing to any serious or even semi-serious discussion of gender/sexuality. Beyond the main character guy being like, nooooo, I'm straight, I'm soooo sad the mermaid is no longer a titty lady :(. Okay there is a part where the vaguely transgender mermaid guy finds out that homophobia exists and gets really upset.

Anyway I disliked this one a lot. Not recommended. Which sucks because I'm always chomping at the bit for FtM genderswap / romance (being the kind of person I am).


Momoiro Ningyo

Deep sigh.

This is a romcom about a super horny mermaid girl who wants to fuck her human boyfriend but is constantly foiled by her mermaid tail.

It also pulls the FtM gender angle but makes it a negative consequence she has to fight against, like she has to consummate her true love or she'll turn into a merMAN! And it's presented very poorly all around.

And I didn't like it. And I can't recommend it.


Ningyo Ouji

Now, here we go, here's something halfway decent. Respectable, even. I enjoyed this, even though the finer details slip from my mind. It's one of those stories that could get a nice Makoto Shinkai adaptation, or something.

A coming of age story / slight romance about a young student who moves from Tokyo to the countryside, who learns about a local legend concerning a mermaid. Sort of a dry summary, but hey, it's a very straightforward story.

I would recommend this for romance & low fantasy/mystery fans. It's a bit like a lighter Kaikisen.

Rumiko Takahashi's Ningyo Series

All of these stories are grouped together on MAL, and so I read all of them for the list.

As someone who is lukewarm on Rumiko Takahashi at best, I actually found myself quite enjoying these- they highlight the best of her episodic storytelling, and she's at the top of her game artistically. Following a pair of people who have become immortal by eating mermaid flesh, each story shows the misery and heartbreak that inevitably befalls all those who covet that prize of immortality.

This is a great introductory for anyone looking to get into her work, and even those who normally don't like her can definitely find something to like here; I know I did. Recommended.


Ningyo no Sodatekata

Well, it's a cute one-volume story about a man who finds a young mermaid washed up on the beach, and takes care of her.

What really sets it apart is that this manga is in full color. It's very pretty; every page is drenched in thick swathes of paint. The fact that it feels like a legitimate artistic endeavor lends it a very distinct, dreamlike charm.

Recommended if you like cute stuff.


Ningyohime no Gomen ne Gohan

I read this one before the list was posted, but hey, it's really good so I may as well gush about it for a minute.

I don't normally like comedy (as all my friends know, I hate fun and happiness) but. The premise of this is just so insanely morbid I was tempted into it. It's about a mermaid who goes on land, discovers the joys of sushi, and leads a double life happily munching on her cartoony fish friends while they all believe she's valiantly trying to save their stolen friends from human fishermen.

Even with this humorous premise, it actually does have a real story with stakes and emotion, and there are indeed a few parts where it's just played straight as horror. The heightened emotions from the morbid comedy stack up in interesting ways, and the ending directly confronts the ethics of her gluttony.

Highly recommended!


Orenchi no Furo Jijou

Well, to sum it up: a parade of moderately funny gags about a high school boy and his enclave of mermaid prettymen, occasionally blasted to hell by completely insane fetish chapters.

Also I hate the little sister character. Her writing is sooooo creepy.

Overall I think that this one is like, peak high school level fujobait, and I can't help but have a little fondness of it due to nostalgia. The latter half, with the more contrived bits and more obvious fetishism, overstays its welcome a bit, but the front of it is neat.

Kind of mixed opinion, really? I guess if you're into midtier gaybaity stuff it's worth a go. Wakasa is cute enough.


Pichi Pichi Pitch: Mermaid Melody

Full disclosure: while I love the magical girl genre, I have never watched nor read Mermaid Melody.

I've watched Sailor Moon, Tokyo Mew Mew, and four and a half seasons of PreCure (Futari wa, Max Heart, Splash Star, Yes! Precure 5!).

For whatever reason, Mermaid Melody just never caught my eye, despite having seen most of its contemporaries. I think as a kid I might have watched one or two amvs of it? But I just... never got absorbed in it.

So this, at age 24, is my first time reading the manga of Mermaid Melody.

It is... incredibly vapid. Amazingly shallow. In a way that its contemporaries really aren't. It's almost shocking. I mean, of course it's a manga for little girls, but like, y'know, both Tokyo Mew Mew and PreCure have teeth! They bite when they really want to!

This has almost nothing.

Then the second half is some kind of bizarre fucking... I can't tell if it's an intentional Go Nagai send-up, but I don't know what else to describe it as. It's about reviving a thinly-veiled expy of Archangel Michael (named Michel) into the sickly body of a young girl so he can destroy humanity? It has weird DNA spirals everywhere and genderfuckery but it's. Still. Mermaid Melody.

There's an evil little bird who's like an expy of Shaiapouf HunterxHunter. I hated him.

Anyway, I don't really rec this unless you're a magical girl completionist/have a worrying hang-up on genderful portrayals of archangels.


Salacia: Waga Hakugin no Mermaid

I literally legally cannot describe everything I hate about this foul abortion of a comic because it involves horrendously sexualized imagery of child soldiers.

I don't know what in the blue fuck Go Nagai was thinking when he drew all this. If he was thinking at all. It's half ripped off from Tezuka's Triton of the Sea (discussed below), half titty and cock shots of its underage leads. It is repulsive, pointless, and nauseating. If you went to a maximum security prison and grabbed the nastiest pedophile there and gave him a tab of acid and made him watch the old Aquaman cartoon and then said "draw an anti-war comic" this is what the end result would be.

Beyond not recommending this, I think every copy of it should be burned. It's an affront not only to Go Nagai's career but to the cultural history of manga as a whole.


Shinkaigyou no Anko-san

Crunches a water bottle in my hand.

This. Is. A weird pervert's slice of life story about various kinds of mermaids, focusing on an Anglerfish girl and her comical predatory lesbian stereotype friend who's obsessed with mermaid tails.

It is almost bearable when it's not overtly fetishistic.

But there is no reason to read it, and I can't recommend it. There's another title on this list with an Anglerfish mermaid that is like, ten times more charming.


Tsuki no Ko

What if a genderflipping mermaid baby in a dubious romantic relationship with a ballet dancer guy was the herald of the apocalypse and went to Chernobyl?

If you are entranced by that description, you will be entranced by this manga.

For me, it's a mixed bag. I can't overlook how creepy Jimmy's romance stuff is, given how immature she is constantly portrayed as, but I do respect Reiko Shimizu a great deal and the sci-fi aspects of the story are really, really great. It's also really beautiful. It's just. Y'know. Genderflipping mermaid child. Hard to get past that.

If you can look past that, I would reticently say to give it a try. Other Reiko Shimizu titles might be better places to start, though. I've been reading Kaguyahime and it's great so far.


Umi no Triton

The second Tezuka manga on the list- and well, I've already said my bit on my prior experience with him up above. I think a lot of that stuff still applies here.

And, well, though it is more epic in scope, a very classy boys' adventure story, I just cannot like it. It's just a little bit... too all over the place for me. He lost the thread somewhere in there. I understand how influential the work is, and the historical importance it has; I mean hell, on this list alone, I can pick out multiple titles which took inspiration from it.

All that said, I do still intend to watch the anime of this.

So I guesss.... Not recommended unless you're an anime history fan.


Utakata no Minato

Remember all that stuff I said earlier about how I hate harem romcoms? I lied. I like this harem romcom.

It has sweet, poppy art, a great cast, a fun premise... and a mid, rushed ending. It still reads very well. I still like it. It's light hearted, very kind, and emotional.

I recommend it.


Watashi wo Tabetai, Hitodenashi.

The lesbians won this season.

I mean, yes, we're all leery of predatory lesbian stereotypes (god knows what I went through reading some of the other shit on this list...). But this blows it all out the gate by having predation in the basic premise: a suicidal girl's flesh smells delicious to monsters, so a mermaid takes it upon herself to protect her until she herself can have a little bite.

I normally hate seinen cynicism bait that paints lesbians in this sort of predatory way, but the writing and art in this have a certain genuine charm that drew me in. It's toxic, and often miserable, but it is about an inhuman monster trying and failing to not only protect someone, but make her happier.

This serialization just started, and so far there are only 14 chapters in English. I'm cautiously optimistic that this might end up being... good. I've already firmly cemented my own positive opinion of it. It walks a fine line of heartwrenching devotion and cynicism in a way that's quite uncommon.

But I've also seen many series with strong starts fizzle out, so only time will tell.

A cautious recommendation for this who like darker romances.


Seto no Hanayome

Darkness death misery hatred misfortune desolation hatred and sorrow.

I hated this.

I hated this and it's excruciatingly long. It's a fucking disaster. It's a swamp of horrible 2000s romcom clichés and there is not a single iota of emotionally honest or redeeming storytelling within it.

I hate harem romcoms.

Not recommended.


Marin the Mermaid

Well, I wish I had nice things to say about this somewhat earlier webtoon (as opposed to Webtoon).

The main problem is that it's too short for any of the characters to have any depth; they pace around undetailed backgrounds like... Well, they're quite literally two-dimensional cartoons. There's not an ounce of character depth to be had in the whole thing. The only thing I can think to compare it to is a shaggy dog story, because it's just fucking pointless.

Also the lore kind of doesn't make sense? Why the mermaids eat hearts? But it doesn't matter because nothing in this story matters.

Not recommended.

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One-shots


Gokurakugai Sanban-doori no Ken

So we actually had only one one-shot this season, as opposed to the Spring interest stack having three. And it's kind of sad, but the trade-off was definitely quality over quantity.

This title oozes style, with strong character writing and a very well-developed world. Centering on a pair of free agents who do dirty jobs for cash in a demi-human slum district, it follows a job they get to save some mermaids from a sleazy brothel owner.

And it's great! It's executed very well despite being a one-shot with a limited pagecount. I would love to see more from this mangaka in the future.


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Dropped Titles


Namiuchigawa no Muromi-san

Further into the abyss I spiral.

There isn't much to say about this one, for me. I gave up on it after the third time the mermaid asked the high school boy to fertilize her eggs. Because it's funny, you see.

The art is mid at best and few of the jokes in this gag comedy land; the ones that do are only just barely funny.

Not recommended!


Otohime Diver

I hated this. Reading it made me feel ill. It's borderline incomprehensible, the art is so overstylized the "cute" girls all look like discombobulated broken backed stickbug monsters, and very very few of them even have distinct designs.

The worldbuilding is piss poor and made me feel like I was. Like. Having some kind of mental issue in my head. Because none of it makes any goddamn sense and yet almost every chapter has a thorough translator's note going over all the obscure references. Like I felt like I was being gaslit, almost, like maybe something is just wrong with me and it's a great story I'm just not getting?

It is overwrought, heavy with detail, in all the wrong places and all the wrong ways. It is physically repulsive to me.

I can't recommend it to anyone.


Swimming Lessons for a Mermaid

Well, I dropped this one at 20 chapters out of 100 (101?). So I can't say much about it except that the art has a sterile feeling and the love triangle is just... boring and cliché.

The protagonist is alright. I like the swimming instructor boy. I hate contrived love triangles and forced drama and scrolling through bloated, padded Webtoon chapters. I just could not compel myself to care about it.

Recommended if you like stupid love triangle high school dramas, I guess. I'm sure it probably gets darker later on but also I do not care.


Kaizoku to Ningyo

Ugly fujobait with a highly contrived setting that repeats the same plot points over and over.

As someone who reads enough BL as is, I cannot deal with yet another mid generic prettyboy series, so I dropped it.

Not recommended.


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Lastly, I'll comment on the sole title from the list I did not read: Shinkai Shoujo.

It's not available anywhere in English, and, given its short length and the rather choice tags on MangaUpdates, I really cannot be assed to look for raws anywhere. So it was a skip.


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Thus concludes the Summer Manga Round Up!! I will see you all back here for Fall.
Return.