The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

Lycoris Recoil

What's It About? 

Japan―a nation where vicious crime and terror have been all but eliminated. And who keeps the peace? Cute schoolgirls, of course! Those uniformed youths you see on street corners and in stylish cafes may just be agents of Lycoris, with pistols in their purses and missions on their mind...

Lycoris Recoil has a story by Spider Lily and art by Yasunori Bizen, with English translation by Kiki Piatkowska. This volume was lettered by Adnazeer Macalangcom. Published by Yen Press (October 29, 2024).

Is It Worth Reading?

Manga adaptations of anime originals can be funny things. Theoretically, going in either direction could let something benefit from adaptational sensibilities, but so often a story designed as an anime first gets a manga adaptation that comes off as merely workmanlike. That's not to say that doesn't happen with prominent manga getting animated either (just look at something like Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer), but it sticks out all the same. With that in mind, the manga version of Lycoris Recoil arrives, adapting one of my favorite anime of 2022 as I sit here still waiting for a follow-up. All those qualifiers in the preamble ought to indicate to you why I wasn't optimistic that this book would really fill that void.

What sticks out immediately is how Lycoris Recoil the manga makes clear that Lycoris Recoil the anime worked because it was an anime. Everything about the presentation of that series was hard-coded to have its charms best represented by the medium. On the printed page, without her bouncily animated mannerisms and Chika Anzai's extremely distinctive vocal performance, Chisato's decidedly unique appeal isn't communicated nearly as well. That's a base character element, and things don't improve when it comes to Lycoris Recoil's defining action scenes. Chisato's trademark bullet-dodging technique could have been impressively conveyed through static panels with more dynamic artistry applied, but what Yasunori Bizen has turned in here is fundamentally functional. Even with solid detailing and fairly consistent backgrounds, more active scenes can devolve into sequences of talking heads, and the scene of Takina 360 no-scope-ing a drone from a moving car doesn't pack nearly the same punch.

If you're just looking for something to effectively convey the story of Lycoris Recoil, then this manga version does get the job done. Unlike so many other adaptations of other anime I've seen, it doesn't seem to be speedrunning the story too hard. There are some odd omissions, like the lack of the montage of the Lycoris secret-police-ing it up at the beginning, which I feel hurts the tone of the story in terms of showing the role of the schoolgirl death squad. But there are a few other additions and tweaks here and there, sticking mostly faithful and properly paced. Then again, that does mean this take on the story has barely gotten halfway through the anime's second episode before the first volume just kinda stops 150 pages in. If you're one to calculate time/dollar/length value, this doesn't end up a particularly impressive proposition, hardly justifying its existence as an adaptation. If you're interested in Lycoris Recoil, and you've got access to Crunchyroll, you're better off checking out the anime version through there. If you're an established fan really jonesing to revisit the story again, you're probably just better off with a rewatch.

A-1 Picture's girls-with-guns story Lycoris Recoil was one of my top anime of 2022, so reading this manga adaptation was a pleasant experience. Artist Yasunori Bizen captures the personalities and likenesses of the main duo Takina Inoue and Chisato Nishikigi well. Chisato is a bundle of irrepressible positive energy contrasting the far more reserved, no-nonsense Takina. As “Lycoris” agents, they work as undercover government-employed assassins using their youth and school uniforms as essential urban camouflage. When Takina's ruthlessly pragmatic streak puts her teammates at risk, she's reassigned to work at “Cafe LycoReco”, alongside fellow agent Chisato.

While Takina thinks nothing of gunning down an entire criminal cabal in a hail of bullets, blood splattering messily everywhere, Chisato refuses to kill, engaging in missions using only non-lethal bullets. So begins a humorous buddy-cop-esque story with Takina and Chisato splitting time between their cafe waitressing work and more serious assignments.

This manga series seems to adapt the anime at the rate of three chapters per episode, so this first volume covers only the first episode and part of the second. While the story doesn't progress too quickly as a result, it does allow for plenty of fun interactions between the two excellent leads, while also providing time for the mystery behind certain secondary characters to build. This is one of the better anime-to-manga adaptations I've read, and the fact it springs from a strong source no doubt helps.