Merry Month of (Shojo) Manga: MIRACLE GIRLS

From the creator of Ultra Cute comes a series that tries to combine your standard, slice-of-life school romance with psychic shenanigans.  The results are...mixed, at best.

MIRACLE GIRLS (Mirakuru Garuzu), by Nami Akimoto.  First published in 1991 and first published in North America in 2000.

PLOT:

Toni and Miki are twin sisters with a secret: they can talk to one another psychically, and when together they can even teleport.  This becomes handy when brainy Miki finds herself stuck on the relay race team for her school's sports day and needs sporty Toni to switch places with her.  Toni finds it hard to keep up the charade when she starts falling for Miki's classmate Jackson, and harder still to avoid the attention of science teacher/wanna-be paranormal researcher Mr. Kageura.

STORY:

Miracle Girls is a cute and simple story, but one that modern readers might struggle to get into.  Part of the reason is the psychic angle.  ESPers were all the rage in manga in the 1980s, so Miracle Girls was trying to cash in on a trend that was already on its way out by 1991.  Mostly it exists as an all-purpose plot device.  Whenever the girls need to get out of a situation, they can just *poof* themselves away. 

Beyond that, Miracle Girls is an otherwise safe, gentle, and rather milquetoast take on a Parent Trap-style twin switch.  Toni doesn't face terribly hard stakes while impersonating Miki.  If anything, most of the complications come from Miki not being honest nor fair with her sister.  She continues to demand that her sister switch places instead of trying to fix things herself, and she refuses to explain why she hates Jackson so much.  In fairness, Toni isn't much better, considering that her growing crush on Jackson is all but smacking her in the face and she can't even begin to figure out how she feels.

The only thing that doesn't feel safe and milquetoast is the plot thread with Mr. Kageura, and if anything that could have stood to be a little MORE safe.  His obsession with the girls is mercifully un-pervy, but it's still a little darker and more serious than what a story like this demands.  I mean, he literally wants to capture and experiment on them like lab mice for the sake of his career!  That's a little intense, and I feel like this is a character that would have benefited from a lighter, more wacky take.  That way it could have brought some levity along with some desperately needed stakes, and it would have made Miracle Girls a much more memorable story to read.

ART:

Much like From Far Away, the artwork here is something of a fusion of 1980s linework with 1990s character designs.  The linework is fine and the characters are fashionable (for the time) and cutely rounded, but they feature the enormous saucer eyes that would become all the rage (particularly in magazines targeted at younger girls).  Those eyes end up limiting their expressions in the end, as it leaves little space for their mouth beyond a squiggly line.  They're also limited by the composition, which is cluttered and busy.  To add final insult, this came from the era in Tokyopop were books were not only flipped, but names were altered to make them more American.  Thus, Tomomi became "Toni," Mikage became "Miki," and Yuya became "Jackson."

RATING:


Miracle Girls is a perfectly inoffensive series that would be suitable for younger readers, but even when brand new it would have been a bit too old-fashioned for its own good.  Combine that with the lack of drama and it makes for a very forgettable manga.

This series is published by Tokyopop.  This series is complete in Japan with 9 volumes available.  All 9 volumes were released and are currently out of print.