Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Missile Happy, vol. 1

By Miki Kiritani
Released in the US by TokyoPop


Slugline: A boy and girl, who love each, plan to get married and live together right now, only occasionally smooch. I'm sorry, I am willing to suspend my disbelief for a lot, but even I have my limits.

Mikako loves her sister so much and is so sure that the marriage matches that have been set up for her sister are wrong, she tries to get the dirt on the men. In one case, she shows up at the door of one of the matches, and bluffs her way into living with him, Rou. Mikako and Rou fall in love, Rou's brother falls into love Mikako's sister, and a whole bunch of really improbable coincidences and improbably personalities clash to set up a completely unbelievable premise for the series. Unbelievable not as in, 'wow, what a coincidence', but unbelievable in a way that makes me think the creator had an editor demanding that the story cram in every conceivable shoujo cliche. The second half of the book is rather run of the mill with solid writing, but the entire setup is just too, well, not stupid, but still requiring a generous amount of ignorance of how people deal with each other. Maybe if the world was a little abstract, a little more crazed, as in not set in Tokyo but somewhere else so that the story had some tinge of fantasy and unreality already in it, maybe I could I buy the premise. But I can't.



Missile Happy, vol. 1 is also available from Right Stuf, Intl., an online retailer specializing in anime and manga.

-Ferdinand

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