Cy-Believers, Vol. 1

By Shioko Mizuki
Go!Comi, 200 pp.
Rating: 16+

Transfer student Rui enters Domus Aurea School with hopes of a fun, decidedly normal school life- and finds anything but. Constantly harassed by an overly amorous fiancé, downsized in her club and under threat from the Public Safety Commission, Rui’s bad luck takes a turn for the strange after a chance encounter with two decidedly different boys. Armed with a secret hideout and serious robotics skills, the two nerdy introverts promise to keep Rui safe and liven things up in the process. When Rui’s club is finally terminated, the three decide to start their own secret venture, no school permission needed—and thus, the Cy-Believers are born!

Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the final frontier of shojo male protagonists. That’s right; this is a series perched atop the premise of improbably attractive computer nerds. Helming the show is bland everygirl Rui, who does little to suggest she’s anything but another cut-n-paste heroine there to anchor the reader against the sea of weirdness she’s afloat in. And weird it is: the campus is an ambiguous hilltop with Roman undertones, where no one ever seems to attend class and colorful cast of characters can find plenty of time to engage in school-related hijinks. Rui’s sadistic fiancé, a student government bigwig, seems relegated either to the task of menacing Rui or raging angrily, occasionally managing to do both at the same time. At the other end of the (decidedly odd) romantic spectrum lies the geek pair du jour, namely in the form of tall, dark, and supernatural Azumi and dreamy, spastic Rio.

And therein lies both the strength and weakness of Cy-Believers: it’s situation based comedy that leans heavily on the characters to pull through. Mizuki winds up her oddball cast and gleefully lets them go, choosing an almost vignette-like structure to move the plot from point to point. If the series could stand to learn anything, it would be that weirdness for the sake of weirdness does not imbue a series with a fun and engaging structure. The formula is reliant on the characters moving from location to location within a hazily imagined campus, throwing out new and quirky tidbits about their natures as crisis dictates.

This character reliance seems even to filter down into Mizuki’s art: the characters are appropriately detailed, but the backgrounds remain ambiguous or lacking. There’s nothing objectionable about the characters’ thin lined, wispy style—that’s shojo standard- but when you can put them in any kind of context, the whole package seems somewhat lacking. Mizuki is more apt to lay down tones instead of proper background forms, occasionally choosing to throw in sketchy, quick lined background drawings when tone would simply be out of the question. The result is less than perfect, and an unfortunate detractor to the story.

Cy-Believers isn’t completely devoid of genuine humor or quirkiness, but the series needs to pair a cohesive plot with its moments of weirdness to beat some structure into the story. It gets points for being wackily different, but difference alone isn’t enough to merit shelf space in a rapidly expanding shojo market. Hopefully as the series moves into the next volume, everybody’s quirks will be sufficiently out in the open, allowing Mizuki to focus on structure. Until then, the series remains a fitfully entertaining but sloppy read.

Volume one of Cy-Belivers is available now.