Review: SUIHELIBE!

 This one is a decidedly more lighthearted take on sci-fi, dug up from the dregs of the CMX library.

SUIHELIBE! (Suieribe!), by Naomi Azuma.  First published in 2006 and first published in North America in 2008.

PLOT:

Tetsu just wanted to join a club, but when he pokes his head into the biology club's classroom, he finds a cute girl climbing out of a crashed UFO.  This is Lan from the planet Noid, who needs to capture a variety of escaped alien lifeforms so she can graduate.  The student council are all too ready to shut down the biology club due to its lack of members, so it's up to Tetsu and Lan to convince others to join them all while capturing more alien creatures and trying (and failing) to keep Lan's identity a secret.

STORY:

In theory, Suihelibe! should be fun.  It should be a light-hearted romp of a manga, the sort of thing that could easily appeal to younger readers.  Yet somehow it never quite comes together, more an amateurish curiosity than anything else, and it took me a bit to figure out precisely why that was so.

I think possibly the biggest reason is that the entire cast is hopelessly underwritten.  Tetsu gets the most effort by virtue of being the protagonist, but a sad backstory with a stray cat isn't enough to overcome his innate grumpiness.  You would think that Lan would serve as his antidote with her sweet, somewhat ditzy attitude, but she's easily the flattest character of them all! She's more of a plot device than anything else, more so than the gaggle of student council kids trying to shut down the club.  The rest of the cast fares no better, as each new member is more gimmicky and boring than the last.

The weak cast undermines everything Suihelibe! tries to do as a narrative.  It's hard to care about whether this biology club survives or not if you don't care about anyone involved.  It's hard to mine any good humor out of such thin personalities.  Even the monster-hunting elements fail to thrill.  As far as I can tell, this was Naomi Azuma's first and only serialized manga and it's clear that she and Suihelibe! were just simply not ready for prime time.

ART:

Azuma's lack of experience shines through in the art as well.  She's clearly trying to make these kids look cute with their big, simple faces and short, doll-like proportions.  Unfortunately they all come off as stiff and their proportions are thrown off by the fact that she seemed to hate drawing necks.  That stiffness in turn undercuts every attempt she makes at both drama and comedy, which makes the narrative feel flat as well.  Even the backgrounds are boring, since most of this manga takes place at an otherwise anonymous school.  The only thing with any thought put into it are the cute outfits Lan wears in the chapter splash pages, as it's the only time this manga flirts with anything resembling style.

PRESENTATION:

The only extra features is the typical author's note, but this brief little comic inadvertently reveals why Azuma fails on so many fronts.  Right away she notes that she became a mangaka suddenly, to the point that she had no idea how to draw backgrounds or find assistants.  She also reveals the logic behind the names for the characters and the comic itself: they are all built around the names of various minerals and elements.  It's a fine detail...save for the fact that it's more relevant to chemistry or geology than biology.

RATING:

Much like Lan herself, Suihelibe! crashes right from the start and never really recovers.  Everything about it is half-baked, and thus it's no wonder that this series came and went without anyone noticing.

This manga was published by CMX Comics.  This series is complete in Japan with 2 volumes available.  Both volumes were published and are currently out of print.