Yuri Manga with a Bang: Love Bullet
These annotations will have minor spoilers for the first volume of Love Bullet.
Love Bullet is a manga that went mini-viral on Twitter a while back when the mangaka inee was at risk of not seeing her work serialized. So manga readers and yuri enthusiasts all around the world rushed to support her wherever they could.
As the contrarian that I am, I didn't pick up reading it until now. I've read everything that's scanlated right now on mangadex if you'd like to check it out for yourself. It's about souls who never got to experience love coming back to life as Cupids, who use guns, grenades, and other tools of war to help humanity find love.
Spoilers begin past this break
I did enjoy what I read so far... Koharu is a very interesting protagonist and the vibes of love bullet are different than whatever I've read before. I do wish the first chapter actually introduced us to her instead of being a mission she was on, but I guess this was conceptualized as a one-shot in inee's mind at first.
The first chapter has a lot of great comedy and ridiculous violence that contrasts the cute cupids, but the actual hook for me started when we got a glimpse at how Koharu became a Cupid. I loved seeing how she used to be a matchmaker at school and how she was never able to reciprocate her best friend's feelings because she died...only to be revived 5 years later as a Cupid who has the chance to become human again if she earns enough karma.
This manga does a lot of interesting juxtaposition of the cute and simplistic characters with exaggerated violence—I'd argue that Koharu's death scene is also like this because the absurdity of it almost outweighed the horror for me. At least the rest of the story is mostly bloodless and involves cure-looking heart-shaped weapons of war.
I love the panelling and execution of this manga. It feels polished for someone's first work. The combat scenes are explosive and they're balanced out with the tender groundedness of the human scenes.
My main complaint about Love Bullet is that because of inee's design choices, the main characters do blend together a bit in a black-and-white manga format. I like seeing how she doesn't use black or dark ink for the cupids to contrast them with the humans, but it does make it hard to tell them apart sometimes. Her color pages are excellent, so I feel almost bad she wasn't able to publish this in color.
I also am not sure how they'd execute the ending of the end goal is for Koharu to become human again. There would still be a massive age gap between her and Aki, you know? And the draw for me, personally is that the Cupids can't fall in love... I'm bisexual but I do think I sort of fall somewhere in the aromantic spectrum lately. I guess the bittersweet angle to Koharu and Aki's relationship is what draws me to them.
Here are my favorite panels.
