The Spring 2025 Manga Guide

Super Ball Girls

What's It About? 

Ichiyoshi is tired of his boring life working at the chocolate factory and keeping his greatest wants close to his chest. While walking home one Christmas night, he catches a mysterious Super Ball bouncing out of the darkness. He throws it as hard as he can...and an impossibly beautiful woman appears before him?!

Super Ball Girls has a story by Muneyuki Kaneshiro and art by Akira Hiramoto, with English translation by Ko Ransom. DK lettered this volume. Published by Yen Press (March 25, 2025).

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Is It Worth Reading?

Christopher Farris
Rating:

Coming from the author of BLUELOCK and the creator of Prison School, it shouldn't be surprising that Super Ball Girls is a weird-horny suite of subversions that delights in psychosexually screwing with its audience. Sure, its laid-out premise of "rubber balls turn into girls" sounds like the sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy aimed squarely at people who only ever thought of women as bouncy toys they could collect. But then the first solid 70 pages of this book are spent chronicling average sad-sack Ichiyoshi's baseline life—not necessarily to justify him deserving a herd of hot rubber-ball women falling into his lap. Instead, as an indication of why he would keep taking care of these creatures even as it becomes clear they might be more troublesome and dangerous than they're worth. Ennui will kill you before the cosmic horrors do, so just like manga creators making a horny manga about rubber ball girls, sometimes you just have to cast off your impulse control and do stupid shit.

While the off-putting weirdness of the childlike Super Ball Girls is undoubtedly part of the point, it might be too off-putting in the earlier chapters, where they're all naught but nonverbal vectors of horniness. This is supposed to underscore the unknowable horror of their origins. Ichi, realizing he can't take advantage of them without popping out more ball girls, lets his desire to care for them come off as more earnest. Things improve to be more interesting once the girls develop a bit more and manifest some core characterizations: stupid, smart, quiet, and horny, which I'm pretty sure were also the base personalities of the Ninja Turtles.

That lets Super Ball Girls lean more into the complexity around these creations and reinforce the horror that was always there. It manifests in the odd bursts of regeneration-fueled ultraviolence, though that does raise the question of whether it's being played for the discordant or if one or more of the creators just has a guro fetish on the side. Por que no los dos? It's only questionable because the potential for that depth is there, expressed in a scene where the "smart" one turns to Ichi—and the reader—and point-blank asks "What am I?" Capacity for questioning existence as a sexed-up anthropomorphized wish-fulfillment gimmick; truly this is the thinking reader's ecchi. That's before this volume closes on hard confirmation that it's dealing with something far more horror-themed and harrowing than readers might've expected from the premise. Plus the art's hitting both the saucy and scary side of things well, with the expected kinds of sexed-up anime lady designs contorting into body horror with an eye for cinematic staging. This could go places, and that potential is always worth checking out.

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Lauren Orsini
Rating:

Every now and then, a manga comes along with such a bizarre premise that I know that whether it's good or bad, it's certainly going to be memorable. Fortunately, Super Ball Girls turned out to be both memorable and good, but not in the way you're expecting. A bone-chilling science fiction thriller that combines sex appeal and body horror, it felt like a hot girl version of Parasyte and left me both unsettled and ready for more. This is not what I predicted the sophomore effort from the Blue Lock co-creator to be, but it's scary, sexy, and electrifyingly different.

Ichiyoshi's life as a factory line worker is so far below his lowest expectations that he's practically afraid to have dreams. The only thing he has to his name is a serious fetish for women's lips. “It'd be nice if a beautiful girl fell right from the sky,” he sighs. You're never going to believe what happens next! When he pockets a strange super ball (one of those bouncy balls you got out of a capsule vending machine when you were a kid) that bounced down from the sky, he is delighted when, back in his apartment, it gradually transforms into a gaggle of nude. bodacious babes. However, this story is no fantasy rom-com. Ishiyoshi's harem brings him nothing but trouble, and they might even be life-threatening, too. The way this manga twists effortlessly from sexy lip illustrations to visions of blood-curdling terror is unparalleled. The girls may seem like a dream come true, but are they human or monsters? I couldn't help but recall another horror comic—Girls by Jonathan and Joshua Luna—that plays with the divide between the titular girls' nude vulnerability and their monstrous capabilities.

At the end of the volume, I was left with more questions than answers. What are these women? Where do they come from? What are they capable of? Are they a blessing in Ichiyoshi's life or a curse? And why do their faces melt clean off when they consume chocolate? This lurid manga tells a gripping science fiction story that doesn't let up. I can see it getting an anime adaptation in a couple of years.

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MrAJCosplay
Rating:

I genuinely have no idea what this series is trying to do. I had high hopes for Super Bowl Girls, considering it was written by the same person who worked on BLUE LOCK, which has easily become one of my favorite sports series over the past couple of years. Plus, we have art done by Akira Hiramoto, the person who worked on Prison School. This meant that there would probably be at least some weird and titillating fan service. What we got was a series that spends half its time establishing our main characters' simple worldview and insecurities. In contrast, the other half is spent on a questionable setup that leaves me more put off than intrigued.

A lot of that does come from the artwork. I never read Prison School, but I'm familiar with its reputation (for better and for worse), and I don't think this art style is really for me. I am all for exaggerated facial expressions, but anytime a character does that in this volume, I feel disgusted and not in a way that I think is supposed to be intentional. Everyone looks just a little bit off in an uncomfortable way, but it doesn't feel like the art is visually trying to communicate anything specifically with that direction. It's just unsettling or ugly. This doesn't feel like thoughtful and intentional body horror for creating a specific uncomfortable atmosphere.

When it comes to the harem element in the manga, that's also very questionable considering the implied mental state of most of the girls present. It is an explicit plot point that all of them have barely developed intelligence, except for one girl, who arguably becomes too intelligent too quickly. However, our main character can't even physically get close to them, as it's implied that doing so will cause the girls to multiply or undergo physical changes. And this man can barely afford to feed himself, let alone a harem. I think there is some novelty in telling a story about actually trying to raise a harem with all the practical and financial difficulties that come with that. That's probably one of my favorite things about the volume.

However, I don't care about the main lead and his overly insecure philosophy. I don't see how the current situation helps his character beyond fulfilling a pretty shallow desire to be seen as the best in someone's eyes. So we're trying to empathize with a lead who wants to be the best in the eyes of women who barely understand how the world works and are mostly already subservient to him? That means the real angle left is about what the girls are, and that can be fascinating. I just think there are already too many things that make me not want to continue reading.

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Kevin Cormack
Rating:

When I picked up this volume to review, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for, and even now I'm still not sure what it is I just read. If I were to put it into words, I'd say Super Ball Girls is the bizarre offspring of the Luna Brothers' graphic novel Girls, and Video Girl Ai, thrown into a blender with Gremlins. It's blatant sexualized wish fulfillment infused with a not-insignificant undercurrent of visceral body horror and existential unease.

The Super Ball Girls of the title are kind of like “what if gachapon capsules were bouncy rubber balls that erupted forth mindless naked girls when thrown,” or reverse Pokeballs spewing forth gravure models with vacant expressions and an overwhelming desire to French kiss men. Protagonist Eita Ichiyoshi is “blessed” with one of these rubber ball beauties after a lengthy chapter where he bemoans his boring, average life, and his total lack of agency or drive to pursue his dreams. Truly, he is the cardboard-kun to epitomize all cardboard-kuns. His disturbing co-worker's failure to win a big horse-racing bet and subsequent meltdown at their chocolate factory job seems to awaken the dissatisfaction within him. “I wish a pretty girl would just fall down from the sky,” he opines with infuriating passivity and entitled sexism.

Inside his tiny apartment, Ichiyoshi throws a bouncy ball he acquired, and out of it appears first a disturbing eyeball, followed by the comically voluptuous girl of his dreams, clothed only with her generous proportions and insatiable desire to imbibe his bodily fluids. The admittedly attractive character art ensures to focus on her levitating bosoms, generous thighs, and callipygian buttocks, of course. This fleshy girl-puppet can't even speak, yet she rams her tongue down his throat, and despite his feeble initial protestations, Ichiyoshi complies with her desires, and reciprocates.

Suddenly, Gremlins-style, three further gachapon balls spring from her spine, and Ichiyoshi finds himself in the company of three more naked girls, who all immediately start fighting each other over access to his body. It's insane. It's deeply uncomfortable, clearly very exploitative, yet doesn't only seem to be an excuse to depict a sexual fantasy from the deepest recesses of the adolescent mind.

Ichiyoshi's obvious terror about his bizarre circumstances, plus his belatedly activated conscience, forces him to try and care for the girls, all without capitulating to their base carnal desires. He realises that if he kisses them, they'll begin to multiply exponentially, leading to mankind's doom. Therefore the future of humanity is left hanging in the balance between a pathetic man-child's barely-restrained horniness and his underdeveloped sense of self-control. Uh-oh. The volume's cliffhanger leaves things on a sinister note that doesn't bode well for the rest of us. I'm almost intrigued to read further. For the plot, you must understand. The plot.

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Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. Yen Press, BookWalker Global, and J-Novel Club are subsidiaries of KWE.