Manga Village

While we here at Manga Village love all the new manga coming out each week, there’s over 20 years of manga releases that we love and want to recommend too! So, in each column, we will look at a genre, or creator, or even publisher to come up with the best titles that we want to recommend to you!

Admitted to the prestigious Tokyo Space School, Asumi appears to be on track to make her dreams come true. However, enrollment was just the first of many trials she must overcome on her path to the stars. By Kou Yaginuma Publisher: Vertical, Inc. Age Rating: Tween/Teen Genre: Drama/Space Price: $10.95 As Space School starts, Asumi is still enthusiastic about it despite having several disadvantages working against her. Her family is poorer than most of the other students. She is there on a scholarship. She has to live in a 40-year-old dorm and work a part-time job in a restaurant. She doesn’t even have a cellphone. Her friend flippantly tells her to ask her parents for one since they’re only 30,000 ($300), not realizing that’s a lot of money for her father to come up with. She’s shorter than everyone else. At 4’8″, she doesn’t fit the standard gear, and will need special gear made just for her. She’s a poor swimmer. We saw in the first volume where she nearly drowned, and as a result doesn’t like swimming. Asumi works hard to compensate for as many of these disadvantages as she can, sometimes to the point of exhaustion and/or injuring…

The sins of the father are visited on the daughter in this second volume of Twin Spica as Asumi struggles with starting at Space School.

In a Tokyo of the not-too-distant future a young girl looks up to the stars with melancholy in her heart and hope in her eyes. Thirteen-year-old Asumi kamogawa’s whole life has been tied to those stars; her future may very well be among them. And she is not alone… Asumi is on of many young people with ambitions to some day head into space in Japan’s first manned space mission. By Kou Yaginuma Publisher: Vertical Inc Age Rating: Teen Genre: Drama/Space Price: $10.95 The dream of going into space is one man has had for centuries, and was finally fulfilled in the last few decades of the 20th century. But no matter what happens, that dream never dies, as we see in the series Twin Spica, a new title from Vertical about 5 young people working to make their dreams of space travel into reality. The focus of Twin Spica is on Asumi Kowagawa. She has some strong and tragic connections to space. When she was 1, Japan’s first attempt at a manned rocket flight into space failed, and crashed into her city. Her mother was badly burned and put int a coma, dying 5 years later.  This tragedy doesn’t…