What do you get when you cross Sailor Moon with St. Tail? This manga.
While what we call mahou shoujo/magical girl series have been around for decades, the 90s were its heyday, particularly in Nakayoshi magazine. Nowadays, Nakayoshi has put much less emphasis on fantasy manga, and outside of the various PreCure incarnations, most modern magical girl series are deconstructions (Puella Magi Madoka Magica), parodies/gender reversal (Cute High Earth Defense Club Love!), or revivals (Tokyo Mew Mew New).
If you already knew all that, having spent many of your manga-loving years consuming titles like Cardcaptor Sakura and Shugo Chara!, then Stellar Witch LIP☆S is a large dash of nostalgia. Is it good? Technically, no. But at the same time, a lot of magical girl manga are not that good, relying on their anime adaptations to give them true fame.
High schooler Miku, like most girls her age, loves the male idol group M.A.G. But she also feels a bit like an outsider, preferring a different member and choosing to do her assigned school chores versus skipping. She even takes it upon herself to look after her science teacher’s office and pet owl. But Miku is shocked to see Marie (nicknamed Mari-chan) floating and is suddenly a babe! The normally slovenly Marie, as she explains, is actually a witch, and she wants to pass on her position to Miku. As the new Witch of the Night, Miku has to protect the world’s life force from those who want to steal it. At the same time, genius boy Ryusei is already a police detective, and he’s going to track down the Stellar Witch LIP☆S.
Or, as Miku and Ryusei soon discover, Witches.
Overall, this is almost a cookie cutter version of the magical girl team, complete with the love interest who insults the heroine and is connected to her secret identity, girls with differing personalities, ridiculous catchphrases, a mascot, and cool accessories to transform. The three chapters here each introduce a new member of LIP☆S, and the usual check-ins with the villains and some romantic tension between Miku and Ryusei. The only thing really different about this series is the heroines are an unusual combination of witches and thieves. (Oh, and the spell incantations, which I believe are nonsense words.) However, the witch theme is much stronger with the girls flying on brooms and using magic wands to cast a variety of abilities, which somehow they know by instinct. LIP☆S are considered thieves because stolen mana takes the form of a beautiful gem, which they then reverse to save people.
So right now, there’s not much story besides introducing the witches and the villains’ plot-of-the-day. Miku, despite being the heroine, so far I like the least since I can’t quite peg her personality; she’s meant to be the cheerful one, but I don’t understand why she’s so hesitant about revealing which boy band member is her fave. And she suddenly kisses Ryusei in the first chapter — why? To seem like a mysterious babe-thief a la Fujiko Mine?
But if you’ve been wondering why you should try this series over all other 90s magical girl manga, the art makes a strong case. Bright, modern, and full of sparkles, it’s so pretty that I swear you could just make a vomic of it and the series would look better than many episodes of Sailor Moon Crystal. And if you want to once again get that feeling of shouting Moon Prism Power or pass it on to the next gen, Stellar Witch LIP☆S is here for enchantment. For everyone else, it’s an almost ridiculous, repetitive fantasy where girls in short skirts are suddenly shouting casting magic as a 16-year-old police genius chases after them.