Miraculous: a book

Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir: De-Evilize (Volume 7?)

I was in Kinokuniya, the place I usually go for comics, and I thought it might be nice to seek out the book version of Miraculous, a TV show my six-year-old granddaughter enjoys.

What can I say? In short, if you’re interested in reading a Miraculous comic, I recommend that you look at the fine print above the bar code on the back cover and hope for a line that includes the text, ‘Volume 1 TPB’. I didn’t know to do that.

I’m not a librarian, but I do generally look on the title page of a book for its official title, and on the imprint page for publication details. This book has neither. By reading the fine print – some of it very fine – and consulting Duck Duck Go, I found out that:

• Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir is a series title
• This volume, De-evilize, collects numbers 19 to 21 of the comic series, and is the seventh such collection
• The three comics were published in 2017
• I imagine that each comic issue represents one episode in the TV show. The episodes, named for the featured super-villains, were ‘Kung Food’, ‘Gamer’ and ‘Reflektra’
• The show appears to have originated in France, though Korea was the first country to screen it
• There is no indication on the book that this is a translation from a French text, although the action takes place in Paris, and street signs are in French
• •Nowhere does the book mention its country of origin. It was printed in Canada but, as far as I could tell from Duck Duck Go, the publisher Action Lab Entertainment is a US company
• Naming the author/s of this book is a complex matter: the series creator is Thomas Astruc; comics adaptation is by Nicole D’Andria; each of the three ‘chapters’ is written by a different pair of writers.

Starting in Book 7, you’re thrown into the middle of bewildering adventures in which two French teenagers (Marinette and Adrien) become superheroes (Ladybug and Cat Noir) through the agency of tiny supernatural creatures. There are magic gadgets called Miraculouses. There’s a bad guy named Hawk Moth who has little pet moths called akumas which he uses to turn disgruntled people into supervillains. Ladybug and Cat Noir do battle with the supervillains, eventually extract the akumas and restore order. The de-akumatised supervillains return to being the friends or benign relatives of Marinette and Adrien. There’s pleasantly complex teenage romantic tension, and familiar high school politics.

In this volume it’s pretty much exact the same story three times, so by the end of the second story I had got the general gist, even though, especially in the fight scenes, I couldn’t tell from the images what was actually going on. And I didn’t much like the computer-generated images. I ought to give you a little taste Here’s page 77*, in which the gentle boy Max is transformed into supervillain Gamer:

I haven’t read this book with either grandchild, but I’ve had fun dropping the catch cries ‘Spots on!’, ‘Claws out!’, ‘Lucky charm!’ and ‘Cataclysm!’ into the conversation.

I wrote this blog post in Gadigal Wangal country, where it is my great joy to live, where the days are getting warmer and the winds are strong. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 77.