The Ancient Magus’ Bride: Collected Fragments vol. 1

This series hasn’t just been popular enough to spawn multiple anime adaptations, but spinoff manga series as well.  While I’m sure that they were all done with mangaka Kore Yamazaki’s approval, I’ve never felt that Japan’s quality control on these things is really any better than America’s.  So I’ve been skipping them and I was prepared to do the same for this one, until I saw that it was a new collection of manga from Yamazaki herself.  “Collected Fragments” brings together the short stories she created for the Blu-ray releases of the anime’s first season in print for the first time and that meant I had to pick it up.

After having read it, I can say for certain that these are definitely stories set in and featuring characters from “The Ancient Magus’ Bride.”  We see Merituuli the Selkie helping out a young boy resolve a decades-old rift between his great-grandfather and the selkie he loved, Chise helping out a lost young man returning to the city back when she lived in Japan, a friend of Angelica’s getting over his anxieties about being a mage, and Mikhail’s barber dealing with his past regrets while watching Alice for a few days.  If you’re worried that any of them contain information necessary for enjoying the main series, don’t be.  These are all side stories designed to be enjoyed by existing fans.

Which is probably for the best since I wouldn’t say that “Collected Fragments” represents the series at its best.  Though it features the kind of supernatural drama you’d expect to see, the characterization is just a bit lacking and the stories themselves don’t have a lot of depth to them.  The opening story with the selkie defaults to a, “Boy, relationships between humans and supernatural creatures sure are hard,” resolution and the rest are about on the same level.  None of what you get here is terrible, but it’s the kind of stuff best enjoyed by completists for either the series itself or Yamazaki’s works in general.