Rose of Versailles, Vol. 1 by Riyoko Ikeda

When he gets to juvvie, Fire Wolf is also there and has been for quite some time, which might make the careful reader wonder why he was out there stealing Easter hats the other day. This naturally leads to him being sent to juvvie literally ten pages later, thanks to a hooligan on a motorcycle named Fire Wolf, who steals that hat right from the store window for him.

The whole tragic tale starts with little Aaron wanting to get his poor mother a hat for Easter. It’s a mood, and if you are not willing to sit and live in that mood, you should reconsider your life choices and also not read this series. Mizuno really gets into the idea of freedom and seeking it, but never really specifies what kind of freedom and most of the seeking ends up being a bunch of hippies driving across the US and getting kicked out of every state and/or hassled by cops along the way. Like a lot of shojo of this era, this book is fully bonkers and completely about the vibes. I chose not to break the spines on these old books, so there are some lines I will simply never know the end of. Plus, this way I got to see that the annoying habit of shojo publishers not leaving enough of a gutter in their books so that art and dialogue gets swallowed up by the binding is not a recent phenomenon-it’s been going on as long as there has been shojo manga, apparently.

Nothing like having a first-edition of a classic shojo manga, and I love getting the original reading experience of a tween in the seventies.

Rose of Versailles, Vol. 1 by Riyoko Ikeda