The Fall 2022 Manga Guide

Coffee Moon

What's It About? 

Pieta, a normal girl, leads an uneventful life in a world of constant black rain. As the rain pours down, she takes her usual route to school and has a pleasant conversation with her friend Danae. This is what every day is like for Pieta, and she takes a sort of satisfaction from her totally normal life. But then her typical, pleasant conversation with Danae...doesn't happen.

Coffee Moon has story and art by Mochito Bota, with English translation by Ko Ransom and lettering by Phil Christie, and Yen Press will release its first volume both digitally and physically on November 22.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Jean-Karlo Lemus

Rating:

Coffee Moon has two things going for it: a fantastic concept and beautiful art. The grim image of the city, likened to a graveyard for the world, ever drenched in an unending downpour while a populace garbed in black huddles through the rain, is striking and memorable. And protagonist Pieta is quite winsome with her curly hair and her darling little black uniform. But it takes a bit for things to really heat up; Pieta reliving the same day over a thousand times (and desperately making sure to not disappoint her dear mother) is perfectly fine for a low-stakes story, but we're given the impression that greater devices are in motion. And yet, we have no clue as to what they are, and it's not until the very end of the story that the consequences of Pieta's actions comes to any kind of actual head. The concept is at least engaging and it definitely inspires continued reading. And for what it's worth, Pieta sharing in her recursion with her friend Danae is cute. But the stakes never stay low enough for this to be a cozy fantasy romp, and they take a bit too long to raise for this to become a particularly gripping mystery. I definitely recommend Coffee Moon, but I also definitely hope the story gets better from here.

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Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Pieta is celebrating her sixteenth birthday for the 1,033rd time. For some reason, she keeps repeating the same day over and over again, and it isn't until that 1,033rd cycle that she finds someone else who has become aware of it: her friend Danae. The girls try to mix things up and have new experiences, but no matter what, everything resets at midnight…or so it seems. When Pieta and Danae unexpectedly encounter classmate Chiaro Tenebrism at an abandoned museum, something changes for Pieta, and now she's actively trying to change one thing in her endless loop. But she's not sure what's behind the whole thing, so that feels like a dangerous proposition, because if there's one thing fiction has taught us, it's that messing with powers you don't understand rarely turns out well.

This is a weird, dark, and fascinating take on the time loop story. Yes, it feels a bit like manga Groundhog Day, but unlike that film, this story takes place in what appears to be a future dystopia. A newspaper at the end of the volume lets us know that it's 2306, but even before that, Danae mentions that a lot of what we'd consider contemporary technology has been lost – there's not a phone of any sort to be seen in the art, and while there are cars and guns, they all look just a little bit old fashioned. There's also the endless rain, which the back copy describes as “black.” Is this the result of a climate disaster in the past? Pieta remembers seeing the clear sky once when she was younger, which calls to mind Ray Bradbury's short story “All Summer in a Day” – a move that I think may be deliberate. The names of the characters are all taken from art – Pieta (or Pietà) refers to images of the Madonna mourning a dead Christ, Danae is one of Rembrandt's best-known paintings, and Chiaro's first and last name conjure up the artistic style chiaroscuro, which uses light and shadow; “chiaro” is Italian for “clear” and “tenebrism” comes from the Latin for “shadow.” That indicates a creator very well aware of their own symbolism, and while it can feel too on the nose or too deliberately bizarre at times, it also largely adds to the fascination of the piece.

Pieta, by the end of the volume, seems done with her day. She's accepted its endless repetitions with relatively good grace up to this point, but her involvement with Chiaro seems to have changed something in her, even as her doppelganger seems to hint that this may be a hell of her own making. I'm definitely curious to learn what happens next.

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Christopher Farris

Rating:

Diving into so many manga for this guide with little context or synopses having previously sold me on them means that "What's really going on here?" is a common refrain for me as I read. Trying to figure out exactly what kind of story I'm getting at the start can be a fun game of context on its own, but in a series like Coffee Moon, it's definitely intentionally integrated into the experience. There are signs from the beginning, of course, with weird, askew setting details we can glance at in Pieta's interactions with her world, before the more ominous, obvious signs we see haunting her. It becomes a question of just how much of a potential tragedy we're watching being set up here, or if it's more intrinsically complex than that. As of the end of this first volume, there's definitely the sense of some sort of esoteric sadness at the root of Pieta's Groundhog Day grievances, but that's mostly for formative flavor more than anything else at this point.

Instead, Coffee Moon is simply compelling in exploring its take on its high concept. Yes there are fun details to recognize in the setup, like the realization that Pieta's noting how it rains every day is because it's the same day. And within this you land on the story playing with time and place as an environment unto itself; the unmoving "Today" as its own setting. Time-loops are of course nothing new as far as story concepts, but Coffee Moon already makes this setup so wholly its own that it feels fresh regardless. The unplaceable time period of the broader world it takes place in helps, I think, as does the bittersweet melancholy with which Pieta approaches the situation she's stuck in, contrasting the fresh-eyed approach of her friend Danae being new to the circuitous setup. The writing pokes at the edges of the sadder circumstances that might have happened to Pieta in the lead-up to and incitement of her situation, but is sure to make time to show how it only reinforces her desire to treat those around her with earnest kindness.

The broader ideas of Coffee Moon branch out in other ways that haven't quite landed. I don't know how well I jibe with the assertion that rich girl Chiaro's wealth puts her in the same sort of isolated situation as Pieta, even as I recognize that this whole story is trying to be about the different ways people are cut off from others. Though Chiaro does provide some unique vectors for the otherwise necessarily-repetitious story to escalate as it goes on, letting the momentum shift in extreme ways that works with the 'anything can happen today' concept. And the art depicting this is a selling point on its own. Mochito Bota's pages, packed as they are to start with the omnipresent rain, show off some dense background detailing populated by characters just as finely-rendered. Frilly, complex outfits play against those heavy backdrops and an enthusiasm for rendering simulated 'camera' effects and playing with perspective. The book shows off the brilliant use of the medium as only static manga pages can, such as drawing raindrops frozen in a moment, both as a snapshot of them happening in that instance, but also an indication of this period's frozen-in-time status. It all makes for a unique introductory read, exactly the sort of thing to get sucked into wondering where it's all really going.

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MrAJCosplay

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The trapped-in-a-time-loop storyline has been done to death, but this is the first time I think I've seen it handled in such a surreal manner. Coffee Moon definitely takes its time to draw you in. It effectively demonstrates the mundane simplicity of our main characters' day while slowly yet subtly pulling back the curtain to reveal a much more twisted reality. Almost everything is turned on its head, and you can tell the author is trying their best to get the most mileage out of this concept from a philosophical and thematic perspective. When you're in a time loop, you can seemingly do whatever you want without worrying about consequences, but what happens when there are trade-offs within that time loop? What happens when there is a set amount of suffering that needs to be doled out no matter what you end up doing?

Among the gorgeous backdrops in Coffee Moon is the use of shadows that help create this strange sense of foreboding that also feels oddly comforting at the same time. Much like the never-ending rain over the town the story takes place in, the dreariness of the setting is something you get accustomed to right away, and I commend the book's ability to draw you in so effortlessly. Sometimes the book does falter a little bit with conveying the passage of time as it's not always made clear exactly how many days have passed or how much time has passed within a single day. But aside from those hiccups, this is a very engaging and beautiful story that I think could appeal to a lot of readers. At the very least, it hooked me, and I am looking forward to the next volume so I can see this world continue to unravel.