Manga Quick Information
Title – Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon: 1
Original vintage – 1992
Mangaka – Naoko Takeuchi
Published by – Kodansha Comics
Genre – Adventure, Fantasy, Magical Girl, Romance
Pages – 248
Ian Wolf's review
One of the most famous manga ever made, Sailor Moon is not only responsible for making the magical girl genre what it is, but also for helping establish manga in the West.
For those unfamiliar with the plot, the story revolves around Usagi Tsukino (most of the characters are named after Naoko Takeuchi's family), a cry-baby 14-year-old girl who comes across a cat with a moon mark on its head called Luna. Luna, who can talk, reveals that Usagi is a guardian called "Sailor Moon" whose duty is to protect a princess and an all powerful gem called the Legendary Silver Crystal.
The first volume, containing the first six chapters (or "Acts"), sees Sailor Moon trying to assemble some allies, these being the genius Sailor Mercury, fiery Sailor Mars and stormy Sailor Jupiter.
In terms drawing style, there are ups-and-downs. Some of the pictures do appeared to be somewhat cluttered. There is one section on page 13 which is full of drawings of little flowers and little else, which for me was too distracting. However, on the plus side at least the transformation sequences are much shorter than what you would see in any anime. Just two pages do it and there is no time wasting.
With regards to the text the translations appear to be OK, although I am somewhat annoyed that certain sections of non-spoken text, such as in a newspaper as seen on the first page and on a shrine on page 102, have just been pasted over in English rather than just having simple translation next to the original Japanese.
The plot however is very enjoyable. While reading the fourth act I did think I knew how the plot was going, thinking that this was going to be where the Legendary Silver Crystal was going to be revealed, but it turns out it was not. Admittedly there are some oddities. For example, the third act ends with one of the villains, Nephrite, speaking in mid-sentence and not finishing. The sentence is not finished in the following act, so we don't know what he was going to say next.
This however is a very enjoyable manga and certainly a good story. With regards to other titbits, the first few pages are in colour, there are translation notes and there is a preview of the second volume, albeit in Japanese. I for one will be buying volume two in English when it comes out.
Score: 8 / 10
