Magical Midlifer Volume 1 Review
In a world where magical girls are full-on celebrities with streaming deals and more, they spend their days defeating witches whilst looking as cute as possible. But witches have familiars; they linger after a witch’s death, and are sometimes even stronger than a magical girl, so who deals with them? Enter Magical Midlifer, a middle-aged man with magical girl abilities but ten times stronger. Midlifers don’t perform for the camera however, they just clean up the mess magical girls and witches leave behind. This manga follows one such man named Tanaka.
This story is by Maki, who has been writing for manga since the late 2010s, and mostly comedy and fantasy titles, sometimes with a gender-bend or ecchi twist. Magical Midlifer fits most of those genres, and it’s currently the only manga of theirs to be licensed in English, and based on this work alone, I find myself feeling a bit mixed towards them.
At first glance, the magical world of Midlifer seems to be a fun twist on the Magical Girl genre. Instead of the girls working in the shadows and having to hide who they are, they are in the forefront, ranking up streaming numbers and it’s a middle-aged man (who looks like someone from admin) that works in the shadows doing the hard work. The problem lies in the clash between these two worlds: magical girls only kill witches who, in this volume, seem to be a lot weaker than their familiars. This begs the question of why witches don’t just use their familiars in battle as they are shown to be much scarier and stronger. Also if magical girls are merely performing a role, then the one agent telling one magical girl to ‘get stronger’ doesn’t really match up.
Then there’s the Midlifer; he’s a laidback guy and a fun character to follow, he even gets his own transformation, which is fun and his design is great too. However the worldbuilding breaks down because the familiars are so much more powerful, and often larger, than the witches themselves, so it’s hard to believe that these Midlifers are working and not caught on camera at all. We see next to nothing of the Witches vs. Magical Girls battles, but we do see the familiars, and their damage output is city-wide at the worst of times. The series is a comedy, so I assume that the idea of a middle-aged man using a magical girl’s wand was the main selling point for this series, but I also couldn’t help but wonder if they considered the possible harmful implications of ‘men being stronger than women’ with this idea, because a man can defeat a powerful creature but women are just performing a role…see what I mean? It isn’t helped by the fact that you have one magical girl who tries to become stronger, and follows our Midlifer around to try and do so. There’s also another who WAS the top dog in terms of magical girls, but is now aged out and working in the office, trying to prove she’s still Number One, and is again upstaged by Tanaka. It feels as if the worldbuilding wasn’t fully fleshed out before Maki began writing this manga.
When it does come together, there’s real potential; for example when we witness Tanaka’s first transformation, it’s a fun moment that sees him aged down with a full outfit to boot (seen on the back cover) and the fact that one of the magical girls finds him hot in the new look is also comical. Also, despite the very sudden switch in genre, there’s a moment where a magical girl’s limb gets cut off and we see blood (where there was no such gore previously) but it works in the moment to up the stakes, and also draws a line between what magical girls do and what the Magical Midlifer accomplishes. I just wish it was in a better written, or at least more fully realised, story.
The art is Nemumi Haiba, who’s been an artist since the last 2010s, with this being their first published work in English. The style is good, with lots of cool details with the Magical Girls outfits, the creepy nature of the familiars, and the vast city that’s put in danger every week. Admittedly they didn’t make the best impression on me via the cover, as the Midlifer’s right hand is way bigger than his left.
Andrew Hodgson does the translation with lettering by Brandon Bovia and it’s a good read; there are no translation notes.
Magical Midlifer is an OK read, there’s potential to be a very amusing take on magical girls, but ultimately the fractured worldbuilding took me out of the story more than it should. If the premise sounds interesting, give it a go, but it’s skippable if you’re not a fan of the magical girl genre in the first place.
Read a free extract on the Yen Press website here.
Our review copy was supplied by the publisher Yen Press.
