My Monster Secret, Vol. 1 (Eiji Masuda)
I read the English version, naturally
(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)
When I dropped off the Supergirl comic, I found the next Ultraman and a couple other things. One of them was "My Monster Secret" which had a girl with bat wings hushing someone on the cover. It was voulme 1, so I gave it a shot.
Basically, it's a high school story with a boy who can't keep a secret, mostly because his face gives everything away. He's known as the "Holey Sieve" (even though sieves are supposed to have holes?). He likes this one girl but is afraid to approach her. He was shot down by another girl before he even had a chance to tell her how he felt. His friends convince him to talk to this girl, who always arrives early and stays late. He finds her in a classroom and she has bat wings. The girl is a vampire.
The boy, Asahi Kuromine, finds this kind of cool. The girl, Youko Shiragami, is glad he isn't freaked out but tells him that she'll have to leave school now because her parents told her that if anyone learned her secret, she couldn't go to a human school any more. Asahi promises to keep her secret harder than any other secret he ever tried to keep. He also asks her to be his friend -- he can't get himself to ask her to be his girlfriend, and even reasons that asking her now would be akin to blackmail. So he's in the friend zone.
The pair are pursued by Mikan Akemi, the editor of the school paper, who only cares about gossip jounalism, ambushing people for stories, disovering secrets, and humiliating people to make herself feel better. The character is supposed to be annoying but is too annoying.
The last character of any importance is the class rep, Nagisa Aizawa, who has her own secret. She's an alien. In fact, she's a tiny alien inside a human looking body. There was a bit early in the comic where this was sort of revealed, but I dismissed it as some sort of manga artistic license thing and didn't take it literally. It wasn't until she was plugging herself in to recharge later that I realized. She turned down Asahi because she has a mission and she can't be distracted. She told him to find another goal. Now that he has, she's a little jealous. Asahi learns her secret, so she wants to use a memroy-erasing hammer to remove the memory of her secret plus that of Shiragami. Shiragami prevents this and causes Aizawa to reconsider.
Interesting story as Asahi now has three secrets: the two about the girls and the one about his feelings (although others see this one as obvious). Reading is a little difficult as there is a lot of fine print when they're talking under their breath, which they do a lot, or when they get excited and talk in a thick outline bubble font where the letters run together. However, people in the demographic this comic is made for probably don't experience these problems.
Maybe I'll read more. On the one hand, it shouldn't be a lot of prolonged battle scenes. On the other, it's a teen romance with a guy in the friend zone and a bunch of secrets. It'll probably get weirder as more quirky characters show up, not that there's anything wrong with that.
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