Being honest, jumping back into a series after some time away is a challenge. There are two types of challenging times that you’ll have to fret about when reading a manga however: when you unintentionally stop reading a series and after a year or so you finally want to jump back in, or there’s no choice but to wait because the US publisher already caught up to the Japanese release. I have been reading Flying Witch since 2021 and it is a combination of both. With it essentially being a once a year release, instead of at least keeping track of it, I just tell myself I’ll get to it at some point — naturally, this never happens. But while most manga published are well behind the Japanese releases, in our times volume releases have actually caught up, for a couple of reasons, for some manga it doesn’t happen so easily.
So the long and short of it is, this combo effectively pushed Flying Witch off my radar. And after much stalling, I was able to check out both volumes 10 and 11. Now the next worry is, will that long delay affect actually understanding or appreciating the series and its many charms?
The answer turned out, in this case, to be an emphatic no.
Flying Witch still remains one of the best manga series out in the market, and some time away maybe has me appreciating the humor Chihiro Ishizuka continues creating out of Makoto, Chinatsu, and the laid-back nature of the witch world more than ever. You won’t find too many series as relaxed as this one, cat spirits and witch self-sabotage occur out of nowhere, but that’s very much the vibe that’s been established from the very beginning. Just that this time, while we see Makoto and family have moments where they greet their neighbors, it’s always simple but never ends as simply as it should (see when just donating vegetables to one neighbor leads to them returning back home with multiple goods). And then when we do get some magical stuff, it’s Akane (maybe naturally) somehow stopping time at the worst possible moment, which hilariously leads to her getting chased by a bunch of witches with smiles on their faces.
That’ll be a lesson for her not to cast magic while drunk!
Other hilarious moments involve Akane, after she learned how to clone herself from one witch, ending up using it to fool her dad (to his horror since they melted after he touched one of them) and Chinatsu and Beachy finding some way to create national TV news because they accidentally sent an “unidentified flying object” into outer space. This doesn’t mean there wasn’t some times an actual story took place in both volumes. While witches are known in this universe Makoto still has kept being one a secret from a few of her friends — so that means someone attempting to shoot a movie would somehow end up putting her in a position where Chinatsu would be the one who’d accidentally spill the beans? How would Makoto’s friends react to this? (probably like how you’d think in this series!) And we even have Chinatsu and Beachy become more integrated into the witches world, somewhat thanks to Akane (because of her drunken time-stopping accident).
There’s still lots to learn about this world, it’s just that we’ll be laughing along the way. Whether it’s a spirit or a human or another witch, Flying Witch comes up with simple acts and expands upon them with gusto. The art really helps a ton where it’s not just the characters themselves but how the backgrounds are drawn, how they’re posed at, etc, which enhances a page. That all makes me returning to this series a great treat. Now I have to make sure I don’t actually take two years to check out volume 12, which is supposed to be released this Spring…