This is another dark magical girl series, though on a rather more personal level than the previous Magical Girl Apocalypse.
Aya is a schoolgirl with a miserable life, suffering the effects of impressively cruel bullies and a brother who uses her as a punching bag. As she reaches the point of considering suicide, she discovers a website, the eponymous "Magical Girl Site", which gives her a magic wand and turns her into a magical girl.
But since this is a dark series, the wand turns out to be a gun, and using it to shoot people she dislikes results in them having horrible accidents that result in their deaths. She's conflicted about this. Yeah, her bullies are gone, but she's now a murderer.
Of course, if the series was only her wandering around shooting people, that might be a bit boring, so it ramps up the tension by having more than one magical girl. Some of them are nice, and some of them want to kill off all the other girls. It's a bit like Magical Girl Raising Project all over again.
Admittedly, this grimness does run a little much. Absolutely nothing is pleasant in this. Everyone has a horrible backstory, society tends to not notice or care that litle girls are getting beaten up/caught with razor blades, and the sheer scale of cruelty gets a bit tiring.
The art is rough, which matches the tone, with the damaged edges giving all the faces a harsh appearance, but it also makes it appear unfinished, and tends to let the eye skim over it without taking much in. There's also a significant contrast between important moments, which are given heavy detailing, and the quieter, in-between moments, which are very plain.
There's hints of a deeper plot here, with the site having a countdown timer to some event (the Apocalypse?) but what that is, we've not yet seen. There's also likely to be a lot more magical girls, to join Aya and Tsuyuno (someone else with a tortured home life), either to look at stopping whatever is coming, or to act as antagonists.
I'll be honest, this one didn't grip me. It appeared on the radar because there's now an anime adaptation and I might have a look at that, but I'm not likely to stick to the manga.
Tagged: Manga Horror Schooldays Magical girls Friendship