Title: A Galaxy Next Door Vol. 1
Author: Gido Amagakure
Publisher: Kodansha Comics
Language: English
Format: Paperback
Pages: 192
Genre: Romance, Supernatural
Publication Date: April 26, 2022
The Story
Ichiro Kuga is a manga author. He was so before his father passed away and now he struggles between serializing a shoujo manga and renting out his house to make ends meet. There, he takes care of his two younger siblings Machi and Fumio. One day, his editor calls and says that he found an assistant for him but he needs to go pick her up.
After a bit of travel, he meets Shiori Goshiki, and… she hasn’t done manga before at all! Worried that this might be a bust, he takes her home and discovers that she’s not only fast but incredibly skilled! She even helps stay and pull an all-nighter so he can make his deadline! After they fall asleep, Kuga notices that there is a G-Pen about to pierce her lower back. He leans over to remove it but it wasn’t a G-Pen but…. Her stinger?
Yes… Goshiki has a stinger and anyone who is stung by it forms a blood pact with her! This blood pact, essentially, makes whoever gets stung her fiancé!! Even though Kuga doesn’t buy her story, weird things start happening! Whenever Goshiki gets far enough away from him, he falls ill. If she feels threatened or emotionally unstable, he also falls ill or shares the same emotions. Slowly, he begins to believe Goshiki’s story and now the two of them must live together with this odd pact between them!
Characters
Kuga is a mild-mannered boy who is shouldering a tremendous amount of responsibility for someone his age. He refuses to get a stable job as drawing manga is his true passion. With a series already serialized, he decided to rent out the rest of the house as well as draw from the inheritance he received from his father’s passing to cover the bills in between commission checks from his editor. There really isn’t anything remarkable about Kuga at all but you can tell that he definitely loves and cares about his younger siblings. Even when it comes to Goshiki, he’s very honest and upfront with her about things… especially when it comes to their relationship. He’s a solid main character that proves that less is more.
Goshiki, on the other hand, is a bit hard to describe. She tells a tale of a meteorite falling to Earth and there was some sort of micro-organism on the meteorite that infected or empowered her people. This gave them some sort of understanding of the stars and the universe which also explains Goshiki’s stinger. It’s not really clear if this island she came from is on Earth or if she’s describing someplace else. Is she an alien? Is she a human turned alien? It definitely seems like the latter as she described this happening over past generations in her family.
As far as personality, she’s reserved at first but the more she lives with Goshiki, the more she begins to open up. She becomes more and more honest with her feelings and even goes so far as to confess! I love how the manga broke the fourth wall when she did by having her state that she now can’t spend 10 volumes slowly building up the confession! I don’t mind this because manga does that way too often. Most of the time, once they build everything up, they never pull the trigger… or if they do, the payoff isn’t truly worth it because they have teased it for so long that the luxury of going out is lost.
Machi and Fumio are just kids but Machi stands out way more than Fumio does who just acts like the silent sibling that’s there when needed. Machi is full of spunk and loves fortune-telling. In fact, Kuga even drew her some tarot cards a long time ago and there’s even a chapter where they are so worn out that he makes her new ones. She’s a lovable little scamp that adds some life to the volume when it’s needed!
Outside of this, we have Moka. She’s Kuga’s childhood friend and right when she said that I groaned. I was like “great… here comes the oh-so-predictable love triangle. Can’t we get a romance series where this DOESN’T happen!?” Well… perhaps someone heard me because it turns out, she’s already married… to Kuga’s editor. WE DID IT! WE AVOIDED THE LOVE TRIANGLE TROPE!! WE HAVE ACHIEVED MARSUPIAL VICTORY!
Final Thoughts
Okay… so let me get this straight…
We have a manga about a guy who draws manga, thus making this kind of like a metaseries… we get this girl who figures out her feelings right away… AND confesses her feelings to the main character in the first volume… AND gets rejected (seemingly) only to realize that she’s actually getting confessed to… AND she agrees to date him!?
Are you meaning to tell me that we just got a romance series that didn’t mess around and pulled all the right triggers right from the start with an interesting hook and amazing characters!?
I… I don’t know how to feel right now. This is like… heaven! The only problem I have is… where do we go from here!?
Well… the answer is that is simple. Goshiki realizes that the pact they made was completely by accident. When Kuga thought that he was removing a G-Pen, Goshiki thought that he was trying to assault her in her sleep. She’s trying to figure out how to annul the pact; however, she’s not doing it because she wants out of her cosmically ordained marriage. She wants to fall in love with Kuga naturally… which… she already has so there is no need for the pact. The hook for this series is going to be them figuring out how to live with each other with the pact until it gets removed but now, they need to learn how to be a couple.
One volume in and I’m really digging this one! It’s an unorthodox romance for sure but it’s hitting all the right notes with me so far! Check this one out if you get the chance!
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This item was purchased for review.
