Captain Momo’s Secret Base (2023) manga review
Description
Editor’s note: all manga pages in this review are read from right to left in the traditional Japanese fashion.
Alone aboard the space freighter Blue Chateau, Moshi-Moshi Momo sits upon piles and piles of books, working out how to make sure the ship and its cargo reach their interstellar destination with the limited resources available. It’s a lousy job, but somebody’s gotta do it.
There are perks, though: Momo, being the only human aboard the ship, never has to wear clothes except for the few times when she checks in with her boss. The sheer number of old books around her means there’s always something to read. She has VR games to play, vintage model trains to build, and she tweaked the onboard meal replicator to create things for her besides food, like more books!
Oh, and she’s not actually alone: always underfoot is Grandpa John, a mysterious cat who stowed away on the ship and has become Momo’s sole companion. She considers him the ship’s first officer, though how useful he is in the role is debatable.
Captain Momo’s Secret Base is a fun little manga volume by Kenji Tsuruta, which, according to his postscript, was created over the span of a dozen years for a magazine called Rakuen three times a year in eight-page installments. Tsuruta refers to it as a hitahita manga, with hitahita translating roughly to the sound of waves lapping against the shore, just enough water to submerge an object, or something done in short order. All of these translations kind of work in describing the manga. While its short chapters are easy to read through, the story (as much of one as there is) takes its time, as does Momo herself. Yes, there’s the possibility of her running out of oxygen, of the ship not having enough power for the trip, but neither Tsuruta, Momo, nor Grandpa John is all that bothered by it, nor are they in any hurry to fix the problem. The art has a fresh, loose feeling to it, as though it were casually made whenever Tsuruta had the time to spare between other projects, and it’s written and drawn with a lot of humor.
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United States
