It's time for me to take a look at a once-beloved shojo horror franchise, long forgotten but not unloved.
NEW VAMPIRE MIYU (Shin Kyuketsu Hime Miyu), written by Toshihiro Hirano with art by Narumi Kakinouchi. First published in 1992 and first published in North America in 1999.
PLOT:
Wherever corrupt human souls exist, you can find the demonic creatures known as shinma. The only defense against them is the half-human vampire Miyu and her companion Larva. By day she poses as an ordinary high school girl, but at night the two of them hunt down and exorcise these malevolent spirits. Her greatest challenge is before her, as an invasion of western shinma led by the masked sorceress Carlua are coming her way. Carlua wants two things: to possess Larva for her own and to destroy Miyu by any means possible.
STORY:
Vampire Princess Miyu is one of those anime franchises that has been seemingly forgotten by time. It was a big deal with 1990s anime fans, at a time when shojo was in short supply and shojo horror was basically nonexistent in the US market. Much of the focus was on its animated adaptations, but we did get a fair bit of the manga as well. While this is technically the third in a long line of Miyu manga, I have to praise Hirano for making it pretty easy to get on board with one. Through a single prologue page and the sequence of Miyu in high school, the reader can grasp the broad strokes of Miyu, Larva, and their purpose.
That allows Hirano to smoothly get to the real point of the story: the fight for Larva. In one corner is Carlua, Larva's younger cousin who still regards him with both the fondness and the possessiveness of a child. In the other is Miyu, whose relationship with Larva is complicated (long story short, he's kind of her thrall, but he also follows her out of sympathy) but it's enough to make Carlua so jealous that she throws together a supernatural gang just to take him back. It's a simple conceit, but an effective one.
You'd think that the clash between eastern and western creatures would play more into the story thematically, but it's mostly there to inform their looks and attacks. It does allow Hirano to draw upon some of the more obscure fringes of European and Middle Eastern mythology, including the Irish cait sith, the Sumerian demon Pazuzu, and the spartoi of ancient Greece. It's a shame that they're about as deeply written as your average Sailor Moon minion. Carlua herself fares a little better, as her haughty exterior hides the heart of a selfish child who never really recovered from the loss of her beloved cousin. It makes her a good foil to the preternaturally calm, mature Miyu in her child-like body. While this volume ends on a cliffhanger, it does its best to swiftly set up an artful premise and get its audience invested, regardless if they were already familiar with the franchise or not.
ART:
This isn't my first time looking at a Narumi Kakinouchi manga, and much of what I liked about Juline is still present here. I love her character designs, which combine the big soft eyes and angularity of 1990s shojo with a naturalism to their bodies and poses that speaks to Kakinouchi's experience as an animator. Her light, wispy linework, freeform approach to paneling, the delicacy of the facial expressions and body language - it's all there and then some. It comes together into an elegant, almost impressionistic whole. It's not even spoiled by the fact that the book is flipped. Best of all, it's not saddled with a garbage translation like poor Juline!
RATING:
This series was published by Studio Ironcat. This series is complete with 5 volumes available. All 5 were released and are currently out of print.
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