You might remember from an earlier post that I ordered about 10 volumes of manga from righstuf recently. Well, I actually got these last week but I didn’t have that much time to read them since I was busy preparing for a Chem exam that I didn’t do well on. Meh, at least I did better than the average (not that hard to do if the average is 54%) Unfortunately, my scanner is back home and I don’t have the USB connector for my cell phone, so no photos.

One story features Nobue trying to stop her addiction to cigarettes.
I’m happy to say that the first volume of Strawberry Marshmallow (Ichigo Marshimaro) seems to remained mostly unchanged from the Japanese version. The story of the first volume Strawberry Marshmallow centers around four cute girls (Nobue, the oldest, Chika, Miu and Matsuri) and their cute misadventures.

Some stories included such serious issues such as two girls trying to learn to get along with each other at a sleepover and other less serious ones like one girl (the oldest in the group) trying to quit her addiction to cigarettes. All in all, this is a very cute manga (which I guess probably has more male readers than female ones for certain reasons.)

All in all, I really enjoyed the manga. Barasui’s artwork is really cute (a word that I’ve probably said too much in this post.) Although most of the stories involve the girls doing normal things, he presents them in a really cute way, especially when they shop for a new hat for Matsuri (nekomimi Mats, FTW.)

Poor little Ana will have to wait until the next volume for her big debut.
I don’t have a lot of complaints about Tokyopop’s release. My biggest complaint isn’t even Tokyopop’s fault. Ana, easily the cutest of all of the Ichigo girls is not in the first volume. Another thing that kind of irks me is that Tokyopop seems to have changed one of the omakes at the end of the volume. In the English version, he states that he can only draw little kids, which makes the girls seem a little peeved. In a scanlation I read a very long time ago, his states that he only likes to draw little girls, which is a whole lot more creepier, funnier, and probably correct.

Seeing as the latter is the only complaint I have against the English localization (and that can hardly be called a complaint, more like a minor preference towards one translation to the other,) I’d have to say that Tokyopop did a good job with this one. Of course, I say that with limited knowledge since I read one volume of the scanlated manga a very long time ago and I can’t remember any major differences between that version and the Tokyopop version, but I don’t think there is that much room for Tokyopop to mess up with this one (nothing, but “normal” conversation in this one.)

A little note: I started this post over a week ago. Because of other exams other than Chem and miscellaneous other problem sets, the post was put on hold. If I said anything a little outdated, you know why.