Justin: Mika Kamiya was once a human who was your typical Comiket-going nerd. Then an unexplained incident happened where she suddenly was reincarnated into a fantasy world full of heroic knights, deadly witches, and hordes of ghoulish creatures. She has little magic power to speak of, but she really wants to go back to her own world. So what idea does she come up with to try and solve her problem?
Bring Comiket to this eccentric fantasy world!
A Witch’s Printing Office was exactly what I expected when Yen Press announced they licensed this. Based on the cover and the description, Mochinchi did the thing and fused Comiket with your usual fantasy worlds. We have a manga that mixes fantasy with social media, so it makes perfect sense to have a manga that tackles Comiket in its own special way.
And that way is not all too different from real Comiket, with some obvious discrepancies. The first is switching doujinshi to tomes, where all sorts of people grab a table and try to sell their wares to those who want it. The second is how it’s being moderated — by the knights in this world, and they sure have to work to stop attendees from rushing in! But otherwise, the manga attempts to recreate the usual comic market experience but in fantasy form, and from the perspective of an enthusiast with middling magic.
But thankfully, the manga makes sure she has a day job. Mika runs a printing press in this world that gives her some extra income. This means even more work outside of the big event and people making requests…such as needing 100 copies of a spell by tomorrow! Then there’s even doing marketing for the event, such as having to create a catalog while teaming up with some of the most powerful magic users in the world. That normally would be mundane, but in this world, you better have someone that can seal magic or else some of those booths can really come to life…!
So, while we see how Comiket runs in a fantasy world, aspects of Mika’s life are pretty vague. As in, we get a one page summary of her somehow being brought into another world. She meets a powerful witch, starts up a job, and connects with powerful people in this world within six months. And after all of that, she comes up with the idea to start Magic Market and hopefully find someone with a tome to return her to her own world. There feels like some omitting has been going on, which means the manga will have to explain at some point just what really happened to her.
…Or not. This manga could really be all about the trials and tribulations of running a Magiket. Like for example there’s a chapter revolving around health and safety where a blacksmith is making replicas of Legendary weapons. Or take the general ladies wearing armor trope and spin it all around. And I mean spin it all around. Heck, let’s not hold back and also recreate the types of allowed doujinshi tomes in the location, alongside event planning and dealing with various problems that pop up.
If that’s the case, I will certainly be curious if the stories will be super interesting. But at least in its first volume, A Witch’s Printing Office is fairly fun, and taking the Comiket part and throwing it into a fantasy blender will always interest me. Definitely looking forward to reading more of this manga.
Justin’s Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Helen: When Mika Kamiya is dropped into an RPG-like, fantasy world she wants to get home but has no idea how. Surely there’s a spell to make that happen, but there’s no unified collection of spells or organization of spellcasters. So, what’s the best way to bring together magic users from across nations, races, and guilds?
Why to stick with what she knows: hold a giant, magical-book-selling market!
We may end up looking back at the 20-teens in a number of years and laugh at just how popular isekai series were, but I hope that people continue to remember this charming, unique story of a girl who just wants to go home and organizes her own Comiket to do it for many years to come! Mika’s not bringing piles of wisdom to another world in order to change it (although she may end up revolutionizing the exchange of information in the process) and she’s not even a great magic user — heck, she’s only managed to master one, mundane spell! But Mika doesn’t need to be an overpowered “hero” to make her idea work, or even a “hero” at all, she just needs connections and some luck!
And so A Witch’s Printing Office progresses through many small events in Mika’s new life; in addition to creating Magiket she’s also running a small-press publisher (Myne from Ascendance of a Bookworm would be so jealous of how easy magic makes bookmaking, Mika is just glad that if she was only able to master one spell it was the one to instantly reproduce a tome’s text!) and a number of her new friends now work with her. My favorite of these small vignettes was the story of a knight who ends up embracing the thrill that comes with staffing an event (something that I think all staffers would relate to, you only keep doing it if you get that sweet energy high from it!), although that chapter also ends up being a very elaborate set-up for a pun that’s not even fully clear yet. My runner-up favorite chapter was one that details how this other world basically re-invents cosplay; Mika should be proud at how many new professions and trades that Magiket is generating, even outside of the convention floor sales!
A Witch’s Printing Office is the kind of comedic, fantasy story for the reader who has grown tired of seeing the usual isekai tropes over and over. I do hope that writer Mochinchi is able to keep coming up with scenarios for Mika (it sounds as if the original, very different, version of the comic wasn’t something they even wanted to seriously pursue, and they really don’t know much at all about how processes like printing work) but hopefully they will keep providing plenty of fodder for Yasuhiro Miyama’s adorable, and gorgeously detailed, art!
Helen’s rating: 4 out of 5