The Spring 2020 Manga Guide

Cosmo Familia

What's It About? 

Alice Amakawa has been alone for years. Isolated in her family's mansion, without even cake on her birthday, she sits. Her family disappeared six years ago, her mother saying they would be back soon. The days creak on and on without them still. When her family left, the cute, cuddly creatures called Cosmoffs, creatures in their control for unknown reasons, suddenly turned feral. They began to destroy property and ravage the world. To make amends, Alice has been hunting down the Cosmoffs, even though the people of her town still revile her for an apocalypse they believe was Alice's fault. This is her life. Until one day, she is visited by the intergalactic police force, who wish to enlist her in destroying the Cosmoffs for good. And a new chapter in Alice's life begins, as she realizes her mother is in terrible danger, and the Cosmoffs might not be the real enemy after all.

Cosmo Familia is an original manga series by Hanokage. It is published by Seven Seas, retailing for $12.99 physically and $9.99 digitally.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Faye Hopper

Rating:

Cosmo Familia is simultaneously overambitious and tepid, unique and totally unmemorable. It throws time travel, an alien invasion, scantily clad space cops and family drama into a blender and yet the mix comes out homogenous and unremarkable. Though it has a lot of interesting ideas and a lot of cool, cute artwork, I ultimately was left cold.

The most noteworthy thing about Cosmo Familia is that—according to the back matter—it is an original serialization from the artist of the Madoka Magicka manga. I love Madoka Magicka (though I will confess to not having read its manga adaptation), so I was hoping this reference was not just a marketing tactic and Cosmo Familia would feature some of the raw emotion, structural integrity and inventive visuals of that classic. It was a vain hope, yes, but these are the feelings I must harbor to get through this. Thankfully, Cosmo Familia's art does, at points, evoke similar feelings of ethereal, wispy majesty and has its own unique riffs on magical girl iconography. A highlight is when our heroine, Alice, falls down a hole into another world (get it?). As she plummets, bubbles float all about her, light pierces through the dark of the portal, and the Cosmoff who has taken her mother's form smiles and radiates. It's a beautiful and arresting moment. Though the character designs are same faced to a fault and the deliberately clashing styles of the cartoon Cosmoffs and the more standard anime humans doesn't make for coherent paneling, these moments of visual creativity and sparkly inspiration show Cosmo Familia's real potential.

Outside of the art, however, it is potential that is not realized. The central mystery of who Alice's mother is and just why she has disappeared is a potentially interesting conceit that, sadly, never makes the reader care. We don't know enough about her to feel why she mattered to Alice, why she wants to see her again so desperately, and no real hints are given as to her true nature such that reader might be curious to know more. The book's depiction of Alice's emotional isolation is similar in how it has potential to resonate, and yet, just doesn't. Alice has been alone for years, starving, hated by the world at large, but the emotional extremes of these circumstances are never plumbed. The manga is more interested in its bizarre, stuffed animal apocalypse and in its jabs at worldbuilding than in the feelings of its characters, and that's a shame. It might be that, as further revelations unfurl, the story becomes more interesting (a scene where up-to-this point antagonistic space cops reveal that the Cosmoffs destroyed their lives adds interesting moral murkiness), but for now, the story is lacking the emotional component it needs to shine.

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Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

What would a story about a girl named Alice be without a rabbit hole? Probably one that came before Lewis Carroll's classic children's novel, which Hanokage's overambitious Cosmo Familia assuredly does not. More to the point, it comes after Hanokage's work on the manga version of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and that influence is one that the book wears like a brightly colored coat, especially as it moves into its second half. At that point it begins screaming “dark magical girl story,” and while that's also where things really start picking up, it's sadly not because of the magical girl elements – instead the story is strongest when it's working with Alice's tortured past as a child abandoned by her mother and left to face angry townspeople on her own.

That means that Raika, Alice's mother, is a leading contender for this Preview Guide's “Worst Mother” award. After somehow filling her house with cute little aliens called “cosmofs” she vanishes when Alice is only ten, telling her to be a good girl and housesit. When her mother doesn't return in a reasonable time, Alice goes to look for her, inadvertently releasing the aliens from the house and causing an invasion of the little property demolishers. In true small fictional town fashion, the other citizens of the town blame Alice in Raika's stead, because if you can't find the terrible woman who knowingly left her small child alone with dangerous alien creatures, then you might as well just go ahead and blame the kid as the closest possible target. And while it is Alice's fault that they got out of the house, the real blame here goes to the woman who, and I can't say this strongly enough, left her small child alone with the aliens for six years.

All of this means that Alice's rabbit hole leading to twenty years in the past is particularly interesting, especially when we find out that Raika was dying of a mysterious disease/Victorian frailty. How did she even grow up to have Alice? Is there some sort of odd time loop going on wherein Alice's trip to the past sets the whole thing off, causing her mother to join with a cosmof because of the alien hunters who followed her down the hole? That's the most interesting theory I'm working with right now, but the visual nods to Carroll's novel, Joanna Spyri's Heidi, and Little Red Riding Hood could all be telling a different story if we use them as the base for figuring out what on earth is going on. By the end things really do start treading a bit too close to the more typical dark magical girl tale, but Hanokage's art is pretty enough – and full of enough flowers and sparkles – that it almost doesn't matter. This is definitely a series where volume two will either make or break it, because while this is neat, that comes with a hefty dose of confusing, and it needs to pick a direction very soon.