MISC. MANGA, *Chikyu Misaki

Take a shapechanging sea monster, and throw in a cool gold heist, and you’ve got the weird manga, Chikyu Misaki. A young girl named Misaki and her widowed father move into her grandfather’s lake cottage which she inherited. The town of Hohoro is a place where it snows alot, but despite that it has a legend of creatures named Hohopos living in the lake, similar to the Loch Ness monster. Misaki becomes friends with Sanae, a local in her new classroom.

On the way home from school, Misaki and Sanae come across a secluded part of the lake and meet an actual young Hohopo. It immeadiately kisses Misaki on the mouth, and then transforms into a young human boy. Misaki and Sanae are amazed by this, specially when he turns back into his sea monster form from oing back into the water. Sanae then kisses them returning him to his human form(it’s the same no matter who kisses him). Misaki then decides to let him live with her for a while, and since she technically owns the new house they live in her father can’t say much against it. Calling him Neo after a certain character from The Matrix, things seem to be slightly happy for Misaki and her cute new boytoy/pet, if only she can teach him to use the bathroom though.

Now going into a completely different plot, a young heiress is kidnapped, and the crooks want her grandfather to pay 240 million in gold for her release. What they don’t know is that the girl’s tutor is part of the kidnappers gang. After getting the ransom, the criminals head out in a plane with the loot over Hohoro during a snowstorm, but the plane crashes into the lake. Only the woman passing as the tutor survives, and is found by a neighbor of Misaki’s who is a lone hunter. The woman tries to find a way to protect her identity, and reclaim the gold now stuck at the bottom of the frozen lake.

So, as if the girl with her pet sea monster storyline wasn’t enough, they managed to fit in a pretty good crime drama too, although the two seem to take a little time to come together. There’s a serious cuteness factor going on with the two girls and their most-of-the-time-naked boy/pet, but CMX edited alot of the nudity involved as they have with several other of their titles. If you can bare that though, you should be able to enjoy a very original and unique manga.