Tia La Cherla kicks off with several beautiful, full-color images serving as a narrated prologue. It’s one of the most gorgeous openings for a manga I’ve read in recent memory. The blue sky, the darkened staircase…it all looks fabulous.
Then we shift to the actual manga.
Erda is an orphan being cared for by a merchant and his daughter. One day, he feels like he keeps hearing a mysterious voice, and he ends up finding a girl who doesn’t speak much and doesn’t even know her name. A lot happens in this first volume, but basically Erda, the girl (named Ruin for now), Yuri the sorcerer, and an air pirate (Arjya) prepare to go on a journey.
And that’s the first volume. It’s a fairly standard opening to an adventure story, showing how the wheels of fate begin to move. Readers will get a pretty good sense of what’s to come and what needs to be revealed during the course of the series. We learn that Ruin possesses some type of forbidden magic, Erda is probably more than an ordinary kid, and that it’s up to Yuri to put the pieces together as well as keep Ruin from falling into the wrong hands.
Whether Erda picked the name Ruin for the girl out of pure coincidence or whether it’s an indication of things to come, I don’t know. But it’s certainly hinted that she could lead to the world’s destruction, and her mere presence means that wolf-beasts keep appearing wherever she goes. Considering Yuri is already struggling against these swarms as well as mysterious enemies, the group could be in for a bumpy ride.
Tia La Cherla takes its name from this world’s god, and the manga explains how the concept of magic works here as well as showcasing some of the tech (airships). Again, though, this is mostly exposition, and the bigger focus is showcasing the characters and the role they’ll play. For instance, the air pirate, Arjya, is one of those rogues who loves transportation vehicles, pretty girls, and job-description euphemisms (think “treasure hunter” for “thief”). Yuri reminds me of Alviss in MÄR, and considering he was my favorite character in that series, I’m looking forward to learning more about his past and his mission. A couple of the antagonists are shown, but one has yet to make their formal debut.
As I mentioned in the beginning, the opening pages are stunning. The rest of the manga isn’t quite as good, but it’s nice. This is a self-published manga, so it obviously doesn’t have the detail of a serialized work, but it has that cutesy vibe. Something like a cross between Vocaloid and Kemono Friends.
I do have a hard time grasping the ages of the characters. When I first saw the cover, I assumed the main character was about eight years old. The story proves he’s obviously older…maybe twelve? A little older? It’s really hard to tell. Arjya appears to be some type of human-beast hybrid, so I hope we see more animal-eared characters throughout the story.
In short, the opening pages of Tia La Cherla are almost worth the cost of admission, but the rest of it is going through the usual motions of bringing the characters together. But with (presumably) the cast assembled, we’ll see how the manga proceeds from here.