A Witch's Printing Office Volume 2 cover image

Returning home from a recent “Comiket,” Mika Kamiya is about to enjoy her haul of comics when she is whisked away to a strange fantasy land.  Searching for a spell that will send her home, Mika does two things.  She establishes Protagonist Press, a publishing house that focuses on spell books, scrolls, summoning contracts, and other magical tomes.  She starts “Magiket” or “Magic Market,” a place where authors, publishers, and creators and makers of spells can sell magical tomes to witches, wizards, mages, and magic users of all skill levels.  Via these two ventures, Miya hopes to meet someone who has the spell that will transport her home.

A Witch's Printing Office, Vol. 2 (Chapters 7 to 12) opens in the magical city of Aile, young Aile Tennos the Eighth hopes to escape her responsibilities by hopping aboard an airship.  She hopes to be taken far away from home, but she meets Mika and soon finds herself at the latest Magiket.  But among the attendees is another surprise for the runaway.

Then, the Demon Lord Satziiko is coming to bring doomsday to the human world.  Oh, wait!  The Demon Lord Satziiko is coming to the Holy Land to attend Magiket?!  Also, Mika meets an usual “Red Dragon” and equally unusual wizard.

[This volume includes miscellaneous art and text.]

THE LOWDOWN:  The A Witch's Printing Office manga is the first Yen Press title in which I have read two volumes.  This manga, however, is not the first time I have come across a manga about a young woman involved in the business of creating and selling magical spells.

A Witch's Printing Office Graphic Novel Volume 2 is the volume that begins to pay off on what I saw as potential and promise in the first volume.  Each volume is its own independent story, but each story expands the narrative's internal mythology, introduces new cast members, or reveals more of the world in which this story is set.  Sometimes, it does all three.

Creators Mochinchi (story) and Yasuhiro Miyama (art) offer six delightful chapters that make this magical world in which the hero, Mika, finds herself feel like a place a reader wants to visit.  The good guys are not necessarily heroes and the bad guys aren't necessarily villains; everyone simply has a story to tell.  Those stories are personified by a love of books, such as the Red Dragon's, who has some rather surprising demands to make of a certain young book publisher and market organizer.

Amber Tamosaitis offers a hugely readable English-language translation that I read, except for one chapter, in one sitting.  I am more sure of A Witch's Printing Office after reading Vol. 2 than I was after reading Vol. 1 (which I did like).  I highly recommend it.

I READS YOU RECOMMENDS:  Fans of manga set in RPG-style fantasy worlds will want to read A Witch's Printing Office.

A
8 out of 10


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