The Best New Manga of July 2017

Hatsune Miku: Acute, by Shiori Asahina
Hatsune Miku Acute is “a different side of Hatsune Miku,” the promo copy says, and they ain’t kidding. This is Dark Miku, driven to madness and ultimately violence by the betrayal of her friends. Miku, Luka, and Kaito were childhood friends and they pledged to always remain so. But a triangle is an unstable configuration, especially when the hormones get going, and when Luka and Kaito start getting it on, things spiral downward in a hurry. Feeling left out, and at risk of losing both her friend and her crush, Miku persuades Kaito to make love to her—and then loses it. Her madness is all the creepier because of the extreme cuteness that never lets up—we’re talking blushing cheeks, big ponytails, and a sharp, sharp knife. This melodramatic story is based, loosely, on a music video that has had over 1 million plays.

Blue Exorcist, Vol. 17, by Kazue Kato
It’s been over six months since the last volume of this series came out, so fans have a bit of time to catch up on the story of Rin, the son of Satan who decides to defy his own DNA by becoming an exorcist. Together with his younger twin Yukio, he attends the True Cross Academy, a school for exorcists. In this volume, their close friend Shura disappears, and Rin and Yukio search for her in the countryside, which gives them an opportunity for a heart-to-heart—while Shura has a mysterious encounter up in the hills.

Mobile Suit Gundam WING, Vol. 1, by Katsuyuki Sumizawa, Tomofumi Ogasawara, Yoshiyuki Tomino,and Hajime Yadate
The Gundam anime and manga franchise is a complicated one, but the plot of Mobile Suit Gundam WING boils down to a very simple concept: Revolution. Humans have set up colonies in space, but peaceful coexistence is only a temporary state. The Earth Alliance seizes control of some the colonies, and the colonists go into full revolt against the oppressor. It’s kind of like the American Revolution, but with mobile suits and lots of grudges. This series is adapted from the anime and takes place, if you’re familiar with the Gundam timeline, in the After Colony era.

The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords, by Akira Himekawa
Each volume of the Legend of Zelda manga follows the storyline of a different game, so although the characters and setting are the same from book to book, they don’t necessarily follow the same continuity. In this story, complete in a single volume, Link shatters into four different-colored Links—Green, Red, Blue, and Violet—and must fight Shadow Link, who has kidnapped the perpetually imperiled Princess Zelda. In order to reunite these prismatic personalities, he must find a special sword that will put him back together and enable him to defeat his mirror enemy.

Waiting for Spring, Vol. 1, by Anashin
Waiting for Spring leans on familiar tropes to produce a high-school romance that never strays too far from the comfortable boundaries of the genre. Mizuki is a shy girl who sees the beginning of high school as a chance to reinvent herself and make new friends. That happens faster than she expects when four members of the school basketball team come to the café where she works and they all end up hitting it off. This ticks off the other girls, who are jealous of her easy relationship with the cute boys, and there’s also the question of whether one of these new friendships will blossom into romance—actually, in a story like this, the question isn’t whether but which one. A good pick for fans of classic shoujo such as Kimi ni Todoke.

Aho-Girl, Vol. 1, by Hiroyuki
Fans of surreal slice-of-school-life comedy such as Nichijou and Azumanga Daioh will find a lot to like about Aho-Girl. It’s a four-panel (4-koma) gag manga about a ditzy girl who does everything wrong but somehow ends up being OK in the end—in part because her friends are constantly running interference. Otherwise, as you can see from the cover, she would be led astray by a trail of bananas, a fruit she finds irresistible.

Haikyu!!, Vol. 13, by Haruichi Furudate
Shoyo Hinata is determined to become a star volleyball player, despite being way too short for the game (and coming from a middle school with no volleyball team). Tobio Kabeyama is his taller, cooler, former rival and current teammate, a serious player with a serious attitude problem. Furudate builds his high school volleyball saga around these two as well as the other members of their team, a varied cast of characters who keep the story interesting. In this volume, the Karasuno team faces off against a new opponent, the Johzenji team, in the qualifiers for the Spring Tournament, and the Johzenji are hard chargers, forcing Shoyo, Tobio, and the others to rethink their strategy.

Queen Emeraldas, Vol. 2, by Leiji Matsumoto
This is the final volume of Leiji Matsumoto’s classic space opera about Emeraldas, a mysterious woman who wanders through space, and Hiroshi, a hotheaded young boy who built his own spaceship, crashed on Mars, and is now scrambling through the universe on a quest of his own. Although it has been a year since the first volume came out, the story isn’t hard to pick up, as it’s episodic and many of the chapters are self-contained. Matsumoto’s graceful art is the highlight of this series, which Kodansha is publishing in hardcover, slightly oversized volumes.

Kakegurui: Compulsive Gambler, Vol. 1, by Homura Kawamoto
If you’re tired of infallibly sweet manga heroines, here’s a series for you: Kakegurui: Compulsive Gambler offers a dark and twisted take on the high school manga. It’s set at Hyakkaou Private Academy, an elite school where the scions of the richest families train to take their place in the cutthroat wider world. But they’re not competing for the best grades, they’re going for the win: everything at the school revolves around gambling, and everything can be a wager, from mundane schoolyard games to a deadly round of Russian roulette. Win, and you’ll command respect. Lose, and you’ll be an outcast—assuming you survive. Into this pressure cooker waltzes a new student, Yumeko Jabami, a girl with a mysterious past and a ruthless plan to rule the school. Yen Press previously published the series digitally in English, but is finally issuing the first volume in print. In Japan, it has received several spin-offs, including a 4-koma parody, and an anime adaptation starts airing this month.

Descending Stories, Vol. 2, by Haruko Kumota
This unusual manga weaves the traditional Japanese art of rakugo, or storytelling, into a master-disciple story. Yotaro was in prison when he discovered rakugo, and when he gets out, he seeks out the master of the craft, Yakumo, and becomes his apprentice. This relationship changes both of them, and in this volume Yakumo relates his own history, starting when he was an orphaned child. Kumota consulted with actual rakugo practitioners while creating this manga, making it both a compelling story and an authentic introduction to an important piece of Japanese culture.
What manga are you reading this month?