“God made the world in just six days” is the story everyone knows but, well, that’s not entirely true. After just six days of work God was out of ideas, threw in the towel, and from the seventh day onwards, God has outsourced the creation of many new forms of life to a team of eccentric designers. Sometimes God relays a prompt to them and sometimes he just watches to see what they come up with (with some designers being more predictable than the others). Invention is a difficult process and, as newbie angel Shimoda comes to understand, is filled with many strange mishaps along the way!
Volume two of Heaven’s Design Team picks up after the first volume’s cliffhanger ending and continues on along in much the same fashion. Except for those pesky cliffhangers at the end of each volume, HDT is a fun, almost relaxing read that may or may not teach you something educational along the way. It’s clear that the creators of HDT are as delighted by the often strange and wonderful life found on Earth as their characters are and the creators make it rather fun to watch the characters wrangle strange requests from God (like, “make the male the mommy”). It’s often an exhausting, and sometimes dangerous, process for the characters and one wonders if any of the creators had previously worked doing client-commissioned design themselves (the comments and revisions from God to the designers often have a familiar ring to them, like someone is channeling their long-held frustration onto the comic page).
I would call HDT a “lightly educational manga, one that may that may teach you something but it’s more akin to the recent uptick in “food” manga, which partially demonstrate how to cook a meal but you’ll need to look up more information on your own before attempting anything. It was fun to guess what creatures they were talking about as the characters went through the design process (I figured out one or two of them but not many!) and since the series is purely a comedy I wouldn’t have any immediate qualms about handing this e-book to readers as young as middle school. Kodansha Advanced Media’s blurbs for these books tell you how much more exciting trips to the aquarium and zoo will be after reading this series and, while that may not be strictly true, after reading you will certainly be full of strange, new animal facts to amaze your friends and family with!
After two volumes of Heaven’s Design Team I could see myself getting bored with this series eventually but for the moment the simple set-up for each chapter, the well-sized cast who are all quirky without being a walking caricature, and the seemingly endless supply of weird animal facts have me hooked. I do think it’s rather unfair that every chapter is self-contained except for the last chapter in the volume, but with a cliffhanger like the one we have at the end of this one I’m sure to come back for more!