Review: THE GOOD WITCH OF THE WEST

 This year things will be especially witchy at The Manga Test Drive.  Witches can take all sorts of shapes in the world of manga, including as innocent shojo heroines.

THE GOOD WITCH OF THE WEST (Nishi no Yoki Majo), based on the novels by Noriko Ogiwara with art by Haruhiko Momokawa.  First published in 2004 and first published in North America in 2006.

PLOT:

Firiel Dee is a gentle girl growing up in the countryside alongside her loving foster parents, her reclusive biological father, and his brilliant but terse apprentice Rune.  On her fifteenth birthday, Firiel is given a beautiful necklace with a blue stone, an heirloom from her late mother.  In truth, Firiel's late mother was a runaway princess and this jewel marks Firiel as a potential candidate to become the next queen.  No sooner does Firiel learn about this than her life is thrown into chaos.  Her foster family is murdered, her bio father has fled, Rune has been captured by a cult, and the only way for Firiel to make it right is to embrace her royal heritage.

STORY:

The Good Witch of the West is so much all at once.  While its title and blurb emphasis its fairy-tale trappings, it's very much a classic shojo melodrama full of family secrets, sudden revelations, missing families, and the faint promise of romance.  For most of the volume it feels like you need a flow chart just to keep track of everything going on, but it all starts coming together once Firiel is forced to take action for herself.

That's good because for much of this volume it feels like Firiel is being carried away by the turbulence of her own life.  Her innocence and purity are laid on so thick that it almost feels comical as she flits her way through the story.  It's only rarely that she's riled up enough to show some backbone, and in those moments you get a glimpse of her true potential.  Rune also gets to show more sides of himself as the volume proceeds, that behind his bossy, know-it-all front is some genuine affection for Firiel and her father which in turn feeds his determination to save them by using every ounce of his intelligence and cunning.

These two serve as the anchor points for the many, many plots swirling around them.  It's not just enough for Firiel to learn she's been a secret princess all this time.  Now she's a secret princess in line to become both the political and religious leader, one where the queen is both worshipped like a goddess and actively suppresses information ranging from astronomy to fairy tales.  It's little wonder that there are now both scheming nobles and an anti-royal cult out to get Firiel and all those close to her.  That's a lot of plot threads to manage all at once!  I suspect it's a little less chaotic in the original light novels, where this sort of information can be delivered a little more gradually.  Some of them do sensibly get set aside for future developments, as most of the focus in the back half is mostly about getting Firiel good and traumatized so that she can set out on her hero's journey.  Even if the story is made mostly of clichés and delivered at a breathless pace, it's still compelling enough to have me wondering what will come next.

ART:

Despite the manga's start in 2004, the artwork here feels very much like a throwback to 1990s shojo art (even more so than the cover illustrations for the original light novels, which were released in the 1990s).  The younger characters come off as a bit scrawny and bobble-headed, although that could simply be because they tend to have small heads with big faces and lots of floofy, lovingly tousled hair.  That said, I do like the way Momokawa draws eyes: dark enough to give the characters' faces some definition but shimmery enough to lend them a bit of delicacy.  

I suspect I would like the art even more if Momokawa gave it a little more space to breathe on the page.  Her panels and page layouts are chaotic, with all sorts of cut-ins, screentones, perspective changes, and dramatic close-ups.  It's sometimes difficult to figure out where the visual focus is meant to be.  This is also a very talkative manga (an artifact of its light novel origins), so that only adds to the chaos.  I want to like the art here, but much like the plot there's simply a lot of things going on all at once.

RATING:

The Good Witch of the West has a lot of interesting ideas and shojo style, but it puts them all together all at once and the end result is a little overwhelming.  I just hope that with all this set-up out of the way, the later volumes are a little less messy.

This series was published by Tokyopop.  This series is complete in Japan with 8 volumes available.  7 volumes were released and are currently out of print.