It’s hard making it as a manga artist in Japan. Competition is stiff, and your publisher doesn’t always have your back. One manga creator, inee, took to social media to help save their yuri (百合; girl’s love) manga Love Bullet from cancellation. They ended up receiving an overwhelming wave of support from English language yuri fans – even though their manga has no official English translation.
Love Bullet: The Cupids are packin’
In Love Bullet, “Cupid” isn’t a god – it’s a full-time job. The workers are young women who died without ever knowing love. The girls now help other people fall in love, using bullets instead of the traditional arrows.
The story starts off focusing on Koharu, a new Cupid. Her team’s current job is resolving a love triangle. Should Hina fall in love with her male friend Daito…or her female friend Aoi? (As a bisexual man, I am HERE for this fierce bi representation.) The triangle is the result of a mistake by a previous Cupid, who shot both friends while they were each looking at Hina.
Unable to decide, the girls split into “Team Daito” and “Team Aoi” and aim to resolve it via a gunfight. Whenever one of them gets shot, however, it affects them differently than humans. Since they’re forbidden from falling in love since they never knew love in life, shot Cupids are paralyzed for about 10 minutes by a fit of agonizing jealousy.
Ultimately, the choice falls into the hands of the undecided Koharu, who…well, you’ll have to buy the manga to figure out how that story ends. Other stories in the first volume address the Cupid’s lives and complex relationships with love – including the love that Koharu never had the chance to experience.
Love Bullet is an extremely cool concept for a yuri manga. inee’s art style – which depicts human beings in traditional manga shading but the Cupids in washed-out grays – is a clever conceit that visually sets the love warriors apart from their human targets.
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A cancellation threat leads to a sales spike
Unfortunately, it’s hard out there for a yuri manga author. Manga is very popular among Japanese consumers. However, there are between 150,000 and 200,000 titles available in the country. Japan retails around 1.9 billion manga volumes (単行本; tankoubon) and manga magazine issues every year. That’s 15 for every person in the nation.
It seems Love Bullet has had a problem breaking through that noise. On September 17th, author inee posted a plea to help boost the work after their publisher, Kadokawa, told them that Volume 1 faced lackluster profits.
What happened next was an amazing lovefest that transcended the Japanese language. Fans around the world – who’ve only been able to read Love Bullet in Japanese or via unofficial “scanlations” – boosted the hell out of the manga, urging fellow yuri fans to buy the Japanese version. Fans published their own art of the Love Bullet characters and gushed over the storyline.
Within the week, sites like Manga Republic and overseas sellers such as Kinokuniya Books sold out of all available copies. This didn’t go unnoticed by the author, who remains engaged in the conversation with their overseas fans, commenting positively on fan art and thanking people for their support.
How you can help
There’s no word yet whether the increase in sales is enough to save Love Bullet. That means you can continue to vote with your dollars (or yen, or whatever currency you happen to have in your wallet, frankly).
No matter where you live in the world, you can give Love Bullet your support. X user @LoveBulletManga advertised an excellent Google Docs guide created by Sancho, complete with screenshots on how to navigate Japanese Websites like BookWalker.
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After buying, you can read the manga via English and other translations online. We can’t link these for legal reasons. However, I read a little of the English translation of the first Google search result and it seems pretty spot-on.
As of this writing, Love Bullet is still sold out at most overseas outlets. However, you can pre-order copies from the next round of printing from Amazon Japan. (And if you need somewhere to display it, Daiso has just the product for you.)
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Sources
日本の漫画. Wikipedia JP
マンガって全部で何作品くらいあるんですか？Goo Oshiete
