WITCH HAT ATELIERS COMING TO THE SCREEN YEYAAHHAHHHHHH
Here's a summary copy pasted from this wiki in case you don't know what this manga is!
"In a world where everyone takes wonders like magic, spells and dragons for granted, Coco is a girl with a simple dream: she wants to be a witch. But everybody knows magicians are born, not made, and Coco was not born with a gift for magic. Resigned to her un-magical life, Coco is about to give up on her dream to become a witch…until the day she meets Qifrey, a mysterious, traveling magician. After secretly seeing Qifrey perform magic in a way she’s never seen before, Coco soon learns what everybody “knows” might not be the truth, and discovers that her magical dream may not be as far away as it may seem…"
Now, for my personal summary; An entire manga that serves as a metaphor for the creation of art, learning the craft, and having such a profound feeling of wonder and connection with the craft. Obviously it does have like, an actual storyline- but the magic system stood out to me almost instantaneously. Since the magic system is writing symbols, and is a craft that can be learned rather than innately born with, there ends up being a lot of parallels to the creation of art. cOuple this with Kamome Shirahama fucking masterful artistic ability and creative panneling, feeling the love baked into this thing through the god damn page... I got hooked almost instantly after picking up the first book in my local library even though I was never a harry potter person, and this would be easily compared to it. I wont yap about it too much since I dont want to give everything away before anyone has the chance to read it- but I love this manga with a good portion of my soul.
Plus, if you want an additional hook to reel you in, it's very clearly lgbtq friendly, theres a good portion of characters that clearly arent traditional and theyre treated as totally normal. I usualy hesitate to say stuff like this since usually saying something involves the lgbtq in media, at least for me, tends ot imply that the media itself revolves around it entirely, or its just slop media pushed onto anyone in the community for the sake of profit, while the actual media itself is dogshit lol. Then again, thats my personal opinion, so you may see it differently!
A few examples of Shirahama's interesting paneling.
Some beautiful panels, splash pages and artworks from the manga!
im gonna go insane all of these are so PRETTYY AND WELL DONE ARHGRHGHSGFHSJ The artistic ability and framing of these are so grgrhrghgrhghgrhghgHGHGHGHG
My fav silly goobers
Olruggio!!!! My beloved!!!
His range... oh brother...
Dagda!!! Father!!!!
Dagda is super interesting to me as a character, I was instantly fond of him when he first appeared, plus i mean... y'know. Im sure you can intuit my own relationship with my own father based on this already evident pattern LMAOBut yeah! His art is always weirdly elegant with his little instrument and stuff, between the long hair and the delicate demeanor since he cares so much for coustas (his adoptive son) combined with the knoweledge that hes some kind of warrior or fighter since hes so beaten up most of the time... good shit lemme tell ya. Im very curious to see if we see more of them both in the future, since coustas has already had his little arc.