BEYOND THE CLOUDS (Beyond the Clouds: La fillette tombe du ciel), by Nicke. First published in 2018 and first published in North America in 2020.
PLOT:
Theo has spent his whole life in Yellow Town, an industrial center under a permanently smoggy sky. He works by day as a mechanic, but his nights are spent tinkering and dreaming of visiting the fantastical places he reads about in books. Then one day a strange girl falls from the sky with an injured wing and no memories. Theo and his friends try to nurse her back to health, but after an attack Theo is injured and the girl, Mia, is sick with an unbreakable fever. Her only hope is for Theo to travel into the mysterious forest near the town, in the hopes of finding a doctor with the cure Mia needs.
STORY:
I'm kind of surprised at how much Beyond the Clouds has flown under the radar. It's an immensely charming and well-written adventure story that appeals just as much to children as it does to adults.
The whole cast of characters are not deep, but they are all delightful. There's a casual coziness to the relationship between Theo and the other people in the mechanic shop, like any good fictional found family. Stronger still is the relationship between Theo and Mia the winged girl. He uses both his talents and his own experience with being orphaned to help Mia, providing not only a replacement wing but also moral support and the comfort that can be found through books and reading. It's handled with more sensitivity than I expected, and it's all just incredibly sweet.
Of course, all that sweet supportiveness can't last forever. Eventually Mia has to be put into peril and the adventure proper must start. Thankfully that gets off to a good start as well, as Theo gets to demonstrate not just curiosity and courage but cleverness as well. The forest itself is not so much scary as it is full of mystery and magic, and it allows Nicke to set up some really interesting story hooks to lead the reader into the next volume. The whole book reads less like a traditional manga and more like the young adult adventure series you wish you could have read as a child.
ART:
Nicke's art fits the gentle tone of the tale. Her style is very casual, soft, and round. Even the animal people fit this aesthetic; most of them are just people with animal ears and tails, save for the mechanic shop owner Mr. Chikuwa who is literally a giant, floofy, bipedal cat. She also uses a lot of hatching and watercolor for texture and on the backgrounds and the inking is so light as to be virtually invisible, which helps give it the feel of a children's book illustration. The settings themselves are fun, be it the winding, worn-down alleys and shops of Yellow Town or the lush, twisting foliage of the forest. The real shame is that we don't get much in the way of color art beyond the cover and first splash page because what we do see is suitably soft and pretty.
PRESENTATION:
This series is something of an oddity. It's drawn by a Japanese artist, but was made directly for a French publisher before getting picked up by Kodansha here in the US, so whether this actually counts as manga depends on how strict you want to get with definitions.
There's a fairly long interview with Nicke afterwards that's very enlightening. She came from a long line of artists and draftsmen, who drew upon everything from manga to Ghibli movies to video games (and Kingdom Hearts in particular) as influences. This series apparently has been one long in the making, one that was inspired by a musical piece from Final Fantasy X and one that she made as an original doujin long before her debut.
RATING:
This series is published by Kodansha Comics. This series is ongoing in France with 3 volumes available. 3 volumes have been published and are currently in print.
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