She’s also created a terrific heroine in Cello, whose relentless optimism and powerful but unrefined technique seem better suited for a shonen tournament series than a cute shojo romance.
Working with this limited color scheme, Kusikawa does muster some visual pizzazz, populating Opal with a comical assortment of birds of varied shapes, sizes, and temperaments. Though the series has considerable charm, there’s a big drawback to The Palette of 12 Secret Colors: it’s monochromatic, making it difficult for readers to distinguish “blue” swatches from “yellow” or “pink” ones. The scenes in which Cello and Guell use friends as sounding boards for exploring their feelings are handled with sensitivity tweens and young teens in the throes of their first crushes will find these passages especially resonant. Nari Kusakawa allows their feelings to develop in a slow but natural fashion over the first four volumes, bringing the question of how they feel about each other to a head in volume five. As a result, she befriends the academy’s doc-in-residence Guell, a grumpy but good-natured palette who always gets swept up in Cello’s misadventures, whether thwarting a group of poachers or tutoring a group of precocious tots.Īs the series progresses, it becomes more and more obvious to the reader that Cello and Guell’s friendship is shading into romance. Alas, Cello is a poor study and frequently stains herself the same bright pink as her beloved bird Yoyo, earning herself numerous trips infirmary to restore her proper skin tone and hair color. Each palette learns how to borrow color from Opal’s exotically hued birds and “paint” objects with those colors. Cello attends a unique academy on the tropical island of Opal, where students study to become palettes, or color magicians. The story focuses on Cello, a wizard-in-training. This delightful, all-ages title has something for everyone: appealing characters, adorable animals, pirates and high-seas adventure, magic, and G-rated romance. Let’s hope that other manga publishers make an effort to fill the void that CMX left with more titles for the pre-teen crowd. And while some of these titles bordered on the insipid, many were excellent, offering kids age-appropriate stories that didn’t talk down to them and didn’t read like advertising for a television show, video game, or toy line.
Throughout its six-year existence, CMX licensed a variety of titles for readers in the eight-to-twelve range. This month’s column marks a sad milestone: the last time I’ll be writing about a new or recent kid-friendly title from CMX.
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