Suzune Magica

This section may contain major spoilers!

Please refrain from reading if you are not yet familiar with all the latest media released.

Cover of the first volume.

Puella Magi Suzune Magica (魔法少女すずね☆マギカ, Mahō Shōjo Suzune Magika) is the fourth spin-off manga in the Puella Magi franchise, written and illustrated by GAN. It is one of three spin-offs that have been released after Rebellion, with the other two being Puella Magi Oriko Magica: Sadness Prayer and Puella Magi Tart Magica: The Legend of "Jeanne d'Arc".

Unusually for a manga series, Suzune Magica was initially released as a single volume, with all other chapters being serialized in Kirara Forward. The first volume containing chapters 1 - 4 was released on November 12, 2013, and it began serialization with chapter 5 in Manga Time Kirara Forward on November 22, 2013, with serialization finishing a year later on November 22, 2014. The second volume containing chapters 5 - 10 was released on June 25, 2014. The third volume containing chapters 11 - 16 was released on December 12, 2014.

Blurb

Note: These are all fan translations.

Volume 1: The admirable junior high school student who works as a live-in employee, Suzune. The girl who lives her everyday life always smiling has a hidden side. That is, she's a magical girl assassin. What's the fate of the four girls she ambushes? And the existence of magical girls, is it good or bad? This is the spin-off's first volume!

Volume 2: The admirable junior high school student who works as a live-in employee, Suzune. The girl who lives her everyday life always smiling has a hidden side. That is, she's a magical girl assassin. As the magical girls of the city are wiped out one by one, what's the way that's left to go amidst the despair and frustration...?

Volume 3: The admirable junior high school student who works as a live-in employee, Suzune. The girl who lives her everyday life always smiling has a hidden side. That is, she's a magical girl assassin. Confronted with the appearance of a new magical girl, Suzune is exposed to the anguish she kept hidden until now. Now she will invite in the final outcome...

Plot

See also: Suzune Magica/Plot

Characters

See also: Suzune Magica Characters

Observations

"Hating someone so much you wanted to kill them" appears quite a bit in Suzune. Haruka wished for Kanata to be erased out of her jealousy, Arisa hated Suzune for killing Chisato and challenged her to a duel to the death, and the whole story happened because Kagari hated Suzune for killing Tsubaki and crafted a gambit to make her life miserable, prior to trying to killing her at the "climax" of said gambit.
Suzune's overall story is similar to the original request that became Madoka Magica, with the request asking for a bloody story where the girls dropped off one by one.
Kyubey says at one point in volume 1, regarding Suzune hunting other magical girls, that from one point on, she suddenly started targeting magical girls and that he didn't know why. This seems inconsistent with a flashback in volume 2 where Suzune inherits Tsubaki's pendant and vows to kill all magical girls, a scene in which Kyubey is present for... until it's revealed in volume 3 that Suzune's memories were altered by Kagari, which Kyubey was not present for; so to Kyubey, it would seem that Suzune's hunting of magical girls was sudden.

Speculation

It is speculated that Suzune Magica had such an odd release life due to poor sales. After volume 1 sold poorly, it was given a chance to get more attention via serialization alongside volume releases. Due to volume 2's poor sales, however, Suzune is speculated to have been cancelled, resulting in the rushed final third where everything is wrapped up and concluded at a fast pace. However, since there has been no word by GAN on this, it is all merely speculation.

Trivia

Matsuri, Kagari and Tsubaki are all named after flowers.
All the characters' first names are spelt with katakana in the story, with kanji only appearing in the profiles at the end of the collected volumes. The only exceptions are Tsubaki, whose kanji name appears in a speech bubble in volume 3, and Kagari, whose kanji name was revealed in a tweet by GAN.
Chapter 14 is the only chapter without a title.

Gallery

Front covers

Volume 1 cover art
Volume 2 cover art
Volume 3 cover art

Official art

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Special Arisa image drawn by GAN, and a stripped version of volume 2's cover.
Art of Suzune.
Art of Arisa. Note that Arisa has blue eyes here, even though the manga covers give her pink eyes.
Art of Chisato.
Art of Haruka.
Art of Matsuri.
Art of Kagari.
Art of Tsubaki in a maid outfit.
Art of Kanami.
Power ranking and elements of all characters for a hypothetical game situation. From this tweet.

Manga pages

Suzune's profile.
Yunagi girls' profiles.
Volume 1 bonus colour page.
Volume 1 bonus end page.
Chapter 10 colour page.
Chapter 13 colour page 1.
Chapter 13 colour page 2.
The Yunagi magical girl quartet.
The Yunagi quartet transforming.
Mika Nishinaka, a girl who bullied Arisa.
Mika's friends and fellow bullies.
Kanata Kanade, Haruka's older sister.
A vision of Kanata.
The two women who work at Yunagi Newspaper with Suzune.
KagarMatsurifather.png

The Hinata twins' father. He's a minor character, only appearing in about three pages.
Chisato's father.
Arisa's mother.
Silhouettes of magical girls Suzune has killed.
Yunagi girls whose deaths Suzune was responsible for; Kanami; and a few other silhouettes.

Miscellaneous

Kirara Magica series announcement pages, with the initial character designs for some of the series' characters.
Page two of the announcement.
Suzunebonusmaterial.jpg

Volume 3 bonus material.

External links

The first twelve pages of Suzune are available for official preview here. Click on the orange button. (Japanese)
Various download links for Suzune Magica on Walpurgischan.
GAN's pixiv account. (Japanese)
GAN's twitter account. (Japanese)
Set of official art by GAN on pixiv. (Japanese)
Tumblr post containing trivia tweets and art of the characters from GAN. (Japanese)
Tumblr post containing the more art and trivia from GAN. (Japanese)
Unofficial Tumblr for everything Suzune related.
Walpurgischan's Suzune thread.
Puella Magi Suzune Magica on TV Tropes.

References