An Overview of some of the Madoka Manga

I was, like, the last person on Earth who wanted to see Madoka to finally get around to watching it. (This seems to be a trend with me; I recently reached the end of One Piece's Skypiea arc, which was published in 2003.) Once I did watch Madoka, I was all in on it and went out and read a bunch of the MadoHomu doujinshi that bear no relation at all to what actually happened in the series, but are totally moe.

Because Madoka has so much alternate reality potential, Madoka Quartet made what I regard as a good decision, to limit Madoka anime to the original series and its direct sequel, Rebellion, and have all other parts of the series be short manga series (typically two or three volumes). Most of the manga are alternate timelines; even the manga that directly adapts the anime series is sort of an alternate timeline since there are a few minor inconsistencies with the anime (including Sayaka's sword being a cutlass instead of a broadsword). They're all written and drawn by different authors, which is interesting because it means that every manga interprets the world and characters slightly differently. It also makes the Madoka franchise uniquely fanon-ruled. Experiencing the Madoka franchise feels more like experiencing Star Trek or Star Wars, with their legions of licensed spinoff novels, or Western superhero comics, than it does the majority of anime. The only other anime franchise I can think of that allows this kind of extensive branching out is the Fate series

Of course, with so many different authors, artists, and stories, the manga aren't all equal. I haven't read them all, but here's my impressions of the ones I have read.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica

This is the manga adaptation of the anime. I actually read Volume 1 before I watched the anime, and the fact that I didn't immediately run out to see the anime highlights some of the flaws in this adaptation.

The art is decent, but it fails at creating the same unsettling sense of heightened reality that the anime used to signal its true nature well before Mami's death. It's competent, but can't reach the high bar set by the anime. (To be fair, most of the manga spinoffs are drawn much more traditionally than the anime, but that particularly hurt this version, since as a direct adaptation it invites comparison to the anime in a way the others do not.)

Speaking of Mami's death, that event was so minimized that I had to read Volume 1 three times before I thought, "Hey, Mami dying was really kind of dark, wasn't it?" In the anime, on the other hand, Mami's death is immediately shocking, both for its unexpectedness and for its brutality. This adaptation and The Different Story both adopt a much more low-key approach to the grimdarkness of the story, which works in a lot of places but didn't serve it well in this instance. 

Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The Different Story

This is my favorite of the spinoff manga. It took two characters who were barely explored in the anime, Mami and Kyouko, and made them so complex and interesting that, even as a dedicated Homura fan who has a Homura nendoroid on his desk at work, I didn't miss her relative absence in these three volumes. 

Almost everything about this manga is perfect. The art is clear and clean and almost draftsmanlike. The facial art is very minimal (it reminds me of the original Final Fantasy Tactics), which paradoxically makes subtle expressions easier to read on the characters' faces. And The Different Story has lots of subtle expressions. With the scenario established, The Different Story proceeds to build a powerful character study focusing on Mami and Kyouko and their relationship before the timeframe of the anime series, when Mami was the senpai and mentor to Kyouko that she later tried to be for Sayaka and Madoka. It covers a lot of dark and sad material, but does so with grace and subtlety, showing both how the characters' flaws and misunderstandings led to the outcome, and also where they could have acted differently to make things better. In the anime, the girls slowly break, and each, in her own way, becomes ruthless and cruel. In The Different Story, the girls are the victims; they define the tragedy, but don't create it.

The Different Story is sad, beautiful, poetic, tragic, and engrossing; it has some of the best character writing I've ever seen in any manga, and also shines in action scenes. It's also the only manga spinoff I've read that actually expands the story (the time Mami and Kyouko spent together in Volume 1 is canon; it happened before the period Homura repeats, so it's universal to all the alternate timelines). 

Puella Magi Oriko Magica

Where The Different Story is my favorite spinoff manga, Oriko is my least favorite. Both the art and story are like "Kouta Hirano presents Puella Magi Madoka Magica". The characters have the same scratchy, hairy look and psychotic expressions as the Hellsing characters, and the plot contains lots of nasty, brutish characters and pointless cruelty. In the anime, even though we came to discover that characters like Homura and Sayaka were mentally unhinged, it was still possible to sympathize with them because we could see how their behavior came out of the trauma they'd suffered as magical girls. In Oriko Magica, the new characters, Oriko and Kirika, are just downright crazy and villainously cruel. Kirika, in particular; she's a "magical girl hunter" who murders other magical girls because she's obsessively in love with Oriko for no apparent reason. They're the bad guys, no two ways about it. 

Another new character, Yuma, was living with her single mother, who abused Yuma and blamed Yuma for her father being a deadbeat until she was killed by a witch. This material could have worked if it had been handled right (e.g. the way The Different Story handled Kyouko's father's abuse of Kyouko's mother), but it's way too on the nose in Oriko Magica; Yuma tells Kyouko, her adopted guardian, that her mother would "do things that really hurt" over a montage of Yuma's mother beating her and burning her with cigarettes. 

In general, Oriko Magica has no subtlety. It does no favors to either its new characters or the established characters, and its confusing, muddled plot flounders for an entire volume, not really going anywhere. Combine that with its ugly art and you have a weak entry in the Madoka spinoff contest.

Puella Magi Homura Tamura

This is the comedy entry: a 4koma about Homura traveling through various absurd timelines. The title comes from the fact that, in nearly every timeline in this series, Madoka is a complete ditz who can't remember Homura's name and keeps called her "Tamura-chan".

In the anime, Homura is possibly the craziest of them all, but in Homura Tamura she's the straight girl, suffering through the bizarre variations on the world she recognizes, such as a world where Mami has taken over as the Tea Queen and forced everyone to wear her hairstyle and drink tea twelve times a day. There are also weird side trips, like the chapter where Homura reaches a restaurant full of copies of herself from other timelines, including an adult version of herself who's given up repeating the timeline and stays to tend bar and cook for other Homuras. The series also takes more subtle digs at the original work, like when Homura fantasizes about a relaxing and romantic vacation with a Madoka who not only doesn't know her name, but keeps switching which wrong name she calls her by. 

For big fans of the original work, it's a lot of fun. The art is pretty good too; Homura has an appealing litheness to her, and the visual gags, like the shifting appearance of Kyuubei, are funny and well executed.

Homura's Revenge

Reading more like mediocre fan fiction than an official work, this would be by far the weakest of the spinoffs I've read if not for Oriko.

The premise is that Homura discovers that if she holds on to Madoka while she goes back in time, then Madoka will travel back with her and retain all her memories of the previous timeline just like Homura herself does. Unfortunately, Kyuubei also manages to grab on to Homura as she travels back, so it too has the memories of the previous timeline. Madoka and Homura try to work together to make sure things turn out better than they did before and proceed to mostly screw it up, sometimes because of Kyuubei and sometimes all on their own. 

This twist in the mechanics of Homura's powers is way too convenient. The tone of the series is definitely more lighthearted adventure than dark tragedy; when Sayaka stumbles on Homura killing Kyuubei with a shotgun, she exclaims "The transfer student just shot some weird creature with a Remington M870!", and Madoka remarks in an aside "You're oddly knowledgable about guns". 

The later parts of Volume 1, however, do have a few interesting twists on the characters. Homura is never as nuts in the spinoffs as she was in the original series. (With the exception of Oriko, where pretty much everyone is nuts.) In Homura's Revenge, she questions herself a lot more than in the anime, and seems much more willing to listen to Madoka and try to communicate with the other magical girls. This makes Mami come off as the unreasonable one; she responds to Homura pretty much like she does in the anime, but it makes less sense because Homura isn't all scowling and secretive, so Mami's refusal to listen to her comes off as Mami being unreasonable. 

It does get a bit more interesting towards the end of Volume 1, and the art is definitely good, possibly the best of any of the Madoka manga I've read. But I can't quite shake this feeling that is was just unnecessary.

Others

Those are the ones I've read some of, but there are at least four that I haven't touched yet: Kazumi Magica, Suzune Magica, Tart Magica, and Rebellion, which adapts the third movie. Kazumi Magica and Suzune Magica both follow different groups of magical girls living in modern day Japan, with Kazumi apparently more lighthearted than the main story. Tart follows Joan of Arc, who was stated to be a magical girl in the anime. If I ever get around to reading those, I'll make another post to cover them.