Magic Touch 4

Izumi Tsubaki – Viz – 2009 – 9 volumes

This volume may as well have come with a big warning sticker plastered across the front.  The characters are dressed as maids right there.  That never bodes well unless the series is actually about maids.

But that’s getting started on the wrong foot.  This series seems to get a lot of hate and winds up on a lot of “worst of” lists, but from what I can tell, it’s really not that bad.  Maybe I just read the good volumes or something, but for a series to be truly terrible, I feel like it has to fail to appeal to fans of the genre.  Magic Touch is bland, but this volume had a number of really cute romantic scenes that I liked even without knowing much about the characters.  There was a short story that took up the middle of the volume about two side characters that I enjoyed quite a bit despite the fact there wasn’t anything all that terrific or special about it.

The earlier story in the volume didn’t really appeal to me since it was an after-party with a bunch of characters I didn’t recognize from a competition I missed by skipping the third volume.  I have a feeling I wouldn’t have enjoyed this section even if I had read the previous volume, because there’s a lot of character-based humor for these brand new characters, and given the really generic and similar-looking character designs, I have a feeling I would have been confused and still not gotten the jokes even if I had read volume 3.

But the second half of the volume is great.  As I said, the middle is a two-part side story dedicated to the budding relationship between a pair of side characters that was highly enjoyable.  And the story that starts at the end of the volume focuses on the tough, stoic Yosuke.  I’m not entirely clear on his deal, but apparently he hates all women except for Chiaki, and even with her, can’t bear the thought of being touched.  This story promises to look into that a little deeper, and apparently will use the flirty massage teacher from the second volume to needle Yosuke into further action.

Also, after not thinking about Pink Lady for years and years, it’s insane that two different manga volumes would drop a Pink Lady reference within a couple months of me reading them.  Not just a Pink Lady reference, but the characters singing the exact same song.  What are the freaking odds of that?  The boys here match Pinoko’s performance of UFO from volume 5 of Black Jack.

Yeah, Magic Touch is nothing spectacular, but it is a cute romance.  I wouldn’t say it’s the worst of anything, really.  Far from it.