Justin: It’s rare for a work to come out of the gates and smack you with how good it is. Normally it takes a lot of world-building, understanding character motivations, etc., before truly taking off. The moment Witch Hat Atelier etched itself as one of the best debuts for me was the very moment Coco, our main heroine, learned a secret regarding magic — that magic is drawn, not cast with words.
Simple, but thanks to the events leading up to it, is very effective.
Witch Hat Atelier begins with Coco living in a rural town with her mom and helping out as a tailor. She’s extremely in love with magic and wishes she could do it herself. The problem is that those who aren’t born a witch can’t do magic, so she’s had to admire it from afar. But one day a real witch stops by after an accident occurs, and she wants to see it. She soon watches that witch cast a spell, but not with magic, but by drawing it.
On the surface, this seems ordinary, but for Coco, it’s a revelation — years ago she met a witch at a festival and bought a book and a pen (which got her into loving magic). Now understanding the true purpose of what she got, she does many experiments on her own and is blown away. She then decides to trace one of the spells from the book. It goes horribly wrong. She is rescued by Qifrey, the witch who stopped by to fix the accident, but he couldn’t save her mom, who is now simply solid crystal. Now Coco, who’s barely begun to learn what being a witch is, has to be one in order to save her.
It’s hard to really talk about good things in manga since it can be a little spoilery, but there are so many layers in the very first chapter of this work that I don’t even have to mention all the great stuff that happens later in this. From the onset we met Coco, who’s very energetic, sweet, but also a creative helper capable of handling things on her own. From how much she loves her mom to making sure she helps out since they no longer have their father, the characters are well defined and so are their motivations. Her life turns upside down twice — the first is when she encounters the witch at the festival. This fueled her passion for magic despite not being able to do it herself, and her watching Qifrey work (without him knowing, she snuck in to see him), pretty much empowered her to do it herself. This leads to the second part of her life turning upside down, as her understanding of magic — of no fault of her own — leads to near catastrophe, as the spell she tried to do from the book ends up crystallizing the one person she loves and has been around with since childhood. Now, she has no other option but to become a witch, or else not only lose her mom forever but even have her memory erased.
This is all in the very first chapter, and so far, we have yet to get into why her memory has to be erased. In short, the world-building is fantastic — with more actions than words, we quickly understand what Coco has to do, Qifrey’s intentions, and the true nature of magic that has been hidden away for a time in this world. This hooked me, and from there, the rest fell suit — from even more explanations of magic in this world, to the characters we meet (Tetia, Agott, Richeh), to how Coco solves her problems, it’s extremely captivating. After I got to the end I really just wanted to read a lot more. Kamone Shirahama’s manga debut in the US couldn’t have gotten off to a stronger start.
As far I know, only three problems exist for this manga: one, the typo that’s on the very first page; two, because communication and time hasn’t been really shown too well I’m not sure how Tetia, Agott, and Richeh got wind that Coco was an outsider so fast; and three, that there’s only five chapters in volume 1. Volume 2 can’t get into my hands fast enough.
Justin’s rating: 5 out of 5
Helen: Coco has been enchanted by magic ever since she received a picture book on it from a witch as a child, although she’s never shown any type of magical ability herself. Years later Coco learns that there was a reason she never seemed to have the innate ability needed to do magic — magic is contained in the tools and movements of the witch, not the witch themselves, and so the witches’ most closely guarded secret is that anyone could use magic. But Coco discovers this through an accidental foray into forbidden magic and some of the witches view her as an unexpected, but valuable, clue to finding the organization of witches which are trying to revive the dark arts. So for the moment, Coco is now a witch’s apprentice and determined to learn all that she can.
The story in Witch Hat Atelier is a charming one that wouldn’t feel out of place in a collection of children’s stories on magic, but it’s Kamome Shirahama’s art that steals the show. The art, appropriately enough for a story where magic is done in ink, looks like it was done in a traditional pen and ink style (although I don’t know if that was actually how the art was created) with screen tones used only sparingly for background elements. I’ve seen other artists try to imitate this style but few seem to really grasp it as well as Shirahama does and with such robust skill; Shirahama feels fully confident in her ability to have both bright whites and stark blacks side by side on the page and in using other tricks of pen and ink drawings to imply distance, shading, and texture (elements that most manga-ka employ screen tones to use). The settings are elegant, graceful, and yet also wild, and it’s clear that we the readers are meant to be as charmed by this world as Coco is.
Speaking of texture in the art, as someone who has been sewing for over a decade there are some aspects of Shirahama’s clothing designs that are shockingly good. I can’t recall the last time, if ever, I saw a character in a manga who wears clothes with clear smocking details and Shirahama is so easily able to portray material, weight, drape, and so many other little details in every panel that I’m frankly stunned. To a non-sewers eye they probably look deceptively simple but she manages to convey even through Coco’s apprentice uniform a few facts about the witches; they are rich enough to wear clothes that require a lot of fabric, layers of it even, and through time or magic they also have those subtle, time-intensive details such as smocking. Most people will probably look to the landscapes or settings when cooing over Shirahama’s world building and those aspects are impressive as well, but the attention paid to just the clothing shows an incredible depth and breadth to how Shirahama has been able to set up this world.
Coco, our leading character, is an easy one to like and Shirahama has also made her feel very real though Coco’s body language. One thing I noticed a lot is how she stretches and compresses her body not in a cartoonish (“squash and stretch”) way but in a way that felt rather familiar to me. You see her lifting her knees high to use the full length of her legs to climb where she wouldn’t normally be able to reach, like when spying on Qifrey, and you also see her sitting on the chair in her room with a foot on the seat, her knee high enough to support her chin, and that reminded me a lot of how I used to sit and move at Coco’s age. Coco is a bit shy at times but she hasn’t yet developed that sense of propriety which would keep her from moving like this; her age is never given but she appears to have that complete command of her body that you have before and after puberty but not doing, making her quite young in deed.
In short, I loved this volume the entire way through and I was torn between immediately reading it again and tearing off to read the entire rest of the run in one go, legalities be damned (Don’t worry, I didn’t give into temptation). I am on-board for this series and just raring for a chance to read volume 2!
Helen’s rating: 5 out of 5