Welcome to the next instalment in my Do I Still Like This Manga series! This time we’re throwing it all the way back to the first manga series I bought where I hadn’t already watched some of the anime. Yep, back when I was 8/9, I bought a few volumes of Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura, and then I started to collect Miracle Girls!
This is a shoujo manga series that not many people will have heard of. Originally published in Japan in the ’90s, Tokyopop bought it to an English-speaking audience in the early 2000s. This was back before Tokyopop started releasing manga published the original way around. So these were shorter volumes, printed the western way around and released with anglicised names for most characters – names I will use in this post.
Ahh, the old days.
Miracle Girls is technically a magical girl series, but not in the way you’d expect. In it, we follow identical twins, Mika and Toni, as they attend school, fall in love and learn more about their psychic powers. The girls go to different schools, and when Mika asks Toni to switch with her to compete in the sports festival, someone seems to catch on to their powers. Putting them at risk as they try to deal with their personal relationships.
I managed to get 7 out of the 9 volumes back when I was a kid. The comic book shop I bought them from then stopped stocking them. When going through my manga recently, I found my volumes and wanted to reread them. This was actually the series that inspired this post series, though it took me a while to get to them. I got the final two volumes secondhand, though one cost me a little more than I’d liked welp. But I finally own the whole series and have read it to completion! So now I’m ready to share my thoughts!
The summary I gave above only sums up the first arc of the manga, and things get a little wilder after that. I remember what happened in this series surprisingly well. Not necessarily precisely or in detail, but I remembered some of the crucial aspects of the final arc. That helped make it more of a fun reread. I had an idea of what to expect and enjoyed going through it again.
It goes from this little switching places in school story to an organisation trying to hunt them down for their powers to them visiting another land with twin princesses. The plotline switches aren’t always the smoothest, but they were all fun.
With this being 90s shoujo and my last post being on Marmalade Boy, you might be wondering how well this series stands up today. And honestly? Nothing about this was really that problematic. There was one instance where it was thought a teacher was being creepy when he wasn’t, and it was instantly dealt with. The only things that felt dated about this series were fashion and technology. And that’s not exactly a problem. It just made me feel a little old. Though, I was only a baby when this series was coming out in Japan, so it’s not like even I’d have been aware of a lot of this stuff back then!
I wasn’t too worried that this series would be all that problematic with it being a kids’ or young teen manga series. So if this is one you want to try to check out, remember that it does read pretty young, but that’s what adds to its charm.
For what it is, which is a young shoujo series about psychic twins, this series really is a lot of fun. It’s not anything special, not really. It’s not that surprising that it’s not that well-known today. But, personally, I loved it as much as I did as a kid. I adored both Mika and Toni as characters. Though Toni was still my favourite.
The characters and the romance were terrific. And the art is charming and cute. It’s a pretty typical-looking shoujo for its time, but it looks pretty on my shelves.
So yes, I still like this manga series. Thank god, because it’s one I’d have been sad to let go of.
Lace and Dagger Books 