The Spring 2023 Manga Guide

Wolf Girl and Black Prince

What's It About? 

Fed up with her friends' constant bragging about their boyfriends, high school student Erika Shinohara decides to make up one of her own. When her lie starts unraveling at the seams, her charming schoolmate Kyoya Sata agrees to be her pretend boyfriend, seemingly saving her reputation. She won't get off that easy, however, as she soon discovers her white knight is actually a blackhearted prince! Now Erika must be at his beck and call or risk her lie being exposed. But is Kyoya really as blackhearted as he seems?

Wolf Girl and Black Prince has story and art by Ayuko Hatta, with English translation by Diana Taylor with lettering and touch-up by Aidan Clarke. Viz will release its first volume both digitally and physically on May 9.

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Oh, man, he said it. It's an actual line of dialogue in the book: “You aren't like other girls.” I'm not sure if that's peak YA or just a kind of sad statement on the writing in this book. Possibly it's both. In any event, where Ayuko Hatta's Ima Koi is harmless fluff, Wolf Girl and Black Prince is something of a throwback to the shoujo manga of yore, specifically the early 2000s. (This was first published in 2011.) The story follows romantically eager high school first-year Erika as she decides that the best way to fit in with her new sort-of friends at school is to fake having a boyfriend herself. When they get ready to call her bluff, she whips out a picture of a guy she took on the street, only to find that he's actually in her grade and something of a heartthrob. He agrees to be her fake boyfriend, but with one condition: she has to be his dog.

None of this is all that new, or even particularly horrific. Kyoya's treatment of Erika starts out much worse than it is in the long run; he seems to tire of summoning her via text fairly quickly, and they sort of fall into a pattern of hanging out together while at school. It's less that he wants to (mis)treat her as a pet and more that he's more cynical than the average bear, and it seems like there are things in his past that made him that way. After all, why would a guy with a fan club of girls who pronounce him “untouchable” and a mom who walked out when he was little trust ladies? He needs a therapist, not a girlfriend.

For her part, Erika does seem to realize this. Her brain is fogged with ideas that life needs romance to be full, and she gives the impression of being someone who will fall for any guy who seems open to the possibility, something borne out when another boy tries to “steal” her from Kyoya. Her devotion to her fake relationship is definitely uncomfortable, but she also seems like she's willing to try and figure Kyoya out, and that's one of the saving graces of the story. The other is that Kyoya limits his less charming moments to snark and occasional hair-pulling; in a different series, he might try something far more sexual.

That's really damning this book with faint praise. It's trying to do something that I daresay it thinks is romantic or maybe a statement about social pressures, but it just doesn't quite come together. It wasn't as bad as I remember the first episode of the anime adaptation being, but it still isn't really my flavor of romance and compounds that by just not having a whole lot to make it stand out.

Jean-Karlo Lemus

Rating:

Eesh, talk about a manga about absolute walking disasters—not that I'm gonna stop reading it. Erika and Sata are both terrible, terrible teenagers, which is why they're so perfect together. Like any good shoujo romance, we have a standoff-ish young cynic and a girl with a heart of gold who finally comes to love someone for the right reasons. Poor Erika is surrounded by teenagers that bring out the worst in her, and what little we learn about Sata shows someone who's had all the hope crushed out of him. It does veer into some uncomfortable territory when Sata demands Erika be her dog or spin around and bark, or even break Erika's phone in one scene. It doesn't get much better when Sata's domineering comes out to be right, since it just makes him out to be someone who just knows better than Erika. Erika definitely needs to learn from her shallow ways, but Sata being a creep just feels like that: being a creep.

Regardless, as much as the circumstances for these teenagers suck at the outset, they do somehow bring out the best in each other: Sata's cynicism shows Erika that her peers are shallow and vain, and Erika's kindness manages to blunt Sata's edge just a little. So while these characters might suck at the outset, there's plenty of room for growth. The emotions ring very true and we have the basis for a very good shoujo series here. Highly recommended.

MrAJCosplay

Rating:

I'm really tired of shoujo stories that are built around the male pretty boy just being a massive asshole to our female lead. You take one look at the cover for this volume and I am immediately rolling my eyes wondering if this is just going to be some kind of sick fantasy like Fifty Shades of Grey. I'm not a big fan of stories that try to mask abuse as some kind of underlying affection because those are incredibly difficult and delicate stories to tell that a lot of really bad writers for some reason feel like they can do whatever they want with. Thankfully Wolf Girl and Black Princess doesn't go nearly as far with the setup as I thought it was going to but it's debatable as to whether or not it puts in the legwork to fully justify its premise.

I think it helps that the gimmick of the male love interest being a secret asshole isn't really played with for that long. If anything, after the first third of the book, there are fewer examples of him treating her like a dog and rather he just gets frustrated with some of her rather understandable antics. I don't like the fact that the book kind of immediately tries to ship these two together and frame the relationship in a romantic light as I don't think it put in the work to do that in a way that felt believable. It really does come off like the heroine's friend suggested that love can come from anywhere and then suddenly she starts wondering if this asshole is supposed to be the love of her life. This is speculation, but it feels like the writer wanted to just tell a story about an asshole treating his female classmate like shit but then got cold feet, didn't commit to it, and just tried to speed run to a more traditional shoujo romance about a misunderstood guy that doesn't know how to express himself. So I am kind of mixed on this because while it's not as bad as I thought it was going to be, it's still not as great as I feel like it could be if that makes sense.