My Happy Marriage Art Book Review
My Happy Marriage is a beloved historical fantasy romance, with its current eight-volume light novel run (the seventh due out in January 2025 from Yen Press), the fifth volume of the manga due out next year (from Square Enix Manga) AND the second season of the anime due to premiere in January 2025. There’s no shortage of content to enjoy for this series, but Square Enix has gifted us, just in time for Christmas, a de luxe art book celebrating the gorgeous drawings of the series that you’ll undoubtedly have enjoyed whether you’re watching the anime, reading the manga or have just caught glimpses of the art on the internet.
Admittedly, outside of a small art book that I got with my special edition of the final volume of Vampire Knight manga, I’ve never owned a full-sized art book before. So I can’t compare it with other art books of its kind. However, as a fan of the series, I wasn’t disappointed, but felt that a few small improvements could have been added/amended to make it even better.
The book makes a great first impression, with a lovely dust cover design of the pair looking happy under a parasol, and gold accents on the logo and edges of the cover too. Under the dust jacket, the hardback cover is glossy with a different art on both the front and back, so there’s plenty to enjoy before you even get to the first page.
The book itself is divided into four chapters that are separated by elegant transparent vellum paper, and covers the events of the first story arc where Miyo and Kudo meet, fall for each other, are separated due to Miyo’s family, and then reunite to officially announce their engagement. There’s no re-telling of the story, but instead the art is in a timeline of sorts, with very small extracts of writing from the light novel author, Akumi Agitogi, spread across certain pages. The Square Enix website advertises these writings as ‘exclusive short stories written by the series author’, but to call them ‘short stories’ I think is disingenuous. The writings at the back of the manga volumes, which are 2-3 pages long and tell different characters’ points of views, I would count as short stories. But in this art book they are paragraphs at most, musings if you will or maybe cut content from the original light novels. For the most part, they’re from Kudo’s POV at different points at the story, such as their first meeting and when he gave Miyo the comb, which are nice to have. But they’re way too short to be considered stories or to really get a perspective from his side of events. If you’re expecting a Midnight Sun, this isn’t it sadly, and there’s even a few paragraphs that are from Miyo’s POV, which I found less interesting as the series is mostly told in her voice anyway.
The written content I found the most interesting is actually at the back of the book, and it’s by the artist, Rito Kohsaka. There’s a detailed breakdown of the cover art, where they go through it from initial sketch to the base colour, to shading, to final touches. As someone who knows nothing about drawing or making art like this, I found it really fascinating; not just the steps the cover art went through from a technical standpoint, but they also provided to some insight into why they made certain choices of colours and flower placements. Right after that we get an Artist Comments section, where each art piece is given a title and small blurb from the artist about what the art piece is and some thoughts on what it represents or just how they feel about it. Again, that insight is really interesting, and you just don’t realise how many different art pieces are made for a release like this. For example I didn’t realise the manga had alternative covers in Japan, and that certain stores had additional pre-order illustrations, for example.
Thankfully, the book is not just cover to cover of previous art printed onto glossy paper; there’s new artwork for this book too. There’s a wide variety from full two-page spreads of the couple, to small snippets of sketches of the side characters, and so on. Although the main focus is Miyo and Kudo, I was surprised by the amount of artwork we get of Kaya, the sister of Miyo, and even one of the pair as kids playing happily (which the artist points out is from an alternative universe). It’s these little sketches and details that show you how much the artist is not just invested in these characters but also thinks about how they would be in certain situations, the colours that match them the best and the poses that work for the mood they want to convey. My favourite artworks from the book ended up being the mostly black-and-white ones, oddly enough. A lot of the art of My Happy Marriage has white backgrounds with flowers, which are always gorgeous, but a few of the drawings with the couple on a black background, contrasted with white outlines of the characters, yet keeping the striking designs of both their faces and glorious outfits, made them pop out more to me.
The book is 128 pages, so there’s a lot of wonderful art to enjoy, and a nice variety too, although it should be noted that it contains art from the manga artist only, therefore there’s no light novel art, and it doesn’t explore story beats that go past the first three volumes of the manga (or the first light novel volume). So if you’re a light novel reader, and are very deep into the story so far, then you might find this even less appealing in terms of story content.
My Happy Marriage Art Book is a gorgeous tome to own, and a perfect gift for any My Happy Marriage fan, whether it be the Christmas holidays or birthdays, etc. It would have been nice to have more exclusive story content from the author, rather than just a few paragraphs here and there, but there’s no denying that this book is as stunning as can be.
See a free preview of the book on Square Enix’s website.
Our review copy from Square Enix Manga was supplied by Turnaround Comics (Turnaround Publisher Services).
