KAMIKAZE KAITOU JEANNE

Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne is a manga published by Ribon Mascot Comics. It ran in the manga anthology Ribon, and ended in July 2000. There are 7 manga tankoubons total and they were published from 1998-2000. The mangaka is Arina Tanemura, who is also the mangaka of Ion and Time Stranger Kyoko (amongst other things). Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne means "Heavenly Wind Thief Jeanne" (kamikaze literally is "god wind" and a kaitou is a thief) and Jeanne refers to Jeanne D'Arc, better known in the USA as Joan of Arc. However, the mangaka wanted to use the original French pronunciation, which sounds sort of like "Jun" and is spelled "Jeanne."

The story is about one Kusakabe Maron, who is the reincarnation of Jeanne D'Arc. Maron lives alone because her parents have left her for some reason (with money and such); she feels extremely alone and she is afraid of caring for people because she is hurt by her parents' absence and doesn't want to care about more people and get hurt more. What does this have to do with Jeanne D'Arc? Absolutely nothing. Maron doesn't really recall being Jeanne D'Arc; she just knows that she WAS. But she is her own person; she's not Jeanne D'Arc in a new body; she is Maron, and her life has shaped her soul to be a different person from Jeanne. How does she know that she is Jeanne? Because she was told by an angel.

Maron lives with Finn Fish, a cute little miniature angel with green hair and white wings. Finn has come to help Maron, because Maron has a job to do; she must work for God. The soul that was Jeanne's and is Maron's has one thing in common in all her lives; she always serves God. Maron serves god by becoming Kaitou Jeanne (yes, this is a magical girl manga) and capturing demons. The demons possess people by finding some kind of picture or artwork that a person loves and possessing the artwork; after that the person is also possessed and is made to do things by the demon. Jeanne's job is to find the artwork that the demon is hiding in and throw a pin into it; the pins are shaped like mini chess pieces. When a pin hits the artwork the demon is in, it sucks up the demon and turns into a regular sized chess piece, at which point Jeanne says, "Checkmate!" The problem, though, is that the original artwork is removed along with the demon, and is always replaced by a beautiful picture of angels. Because of this Jeanne is known as an art thief and the police are always trying to capture her. Unfortunately, Maron's best friend, an assertive girl named Miyako, is also the daughter of the police chief and she's made it her personal mission to capture Jeanne. So Maron has to make sure she hides her secret identity as Jeanne from Miyako, because she doesn't want Miyako to find out that the art thief Jeanne is really her best friend Maron.

But one day Maron's job becomes much more complicated, because she gets some competition - Kaitou Sinbad, a young man who also is trying to capture the demons with chess pieces and who is also accompanied by a miniature angel. The difference is that Sinbad's chess pieces are black and his angel (named Access Time) has black wings; it seems Sinbad is trying to capture the power of the demons for the devil.

Meanwhile, a new tenant has moved in to Maron and Miyako's apartment building; a cute young guy named Chiaki, who also lives alone, and who seems to really have a thing for Maron, despite the way that Miyako practically throws herself at him whenever she sees him. Maron doesn't want to have any kind of relationship with him because she's trying to avoid any new relationships; but she can't help starting to fall for him, because he's always flirting with her or trying to make her smile. But... she doesn't know it, but Chiaki is really Kaitou Sinbad, and more than that.. he knows that she is Jeanne, and it's his plan that she fall in love with him so he can try to get rid of her. But though this plan of his seems malevolent, it starts to fall apart as soon as he really spends any time with her, because he really starts to like Maron. Still... he has to do his duty and fight her as Sinbad.

As the manga goes on Maron has to make a lot of choices and faces a lot of difficult situations. As Jeanne she is bound to serve God, but as Maron she has free will; if she falls in love with Chiaki, she still has to fight him as Sinbad, even if she doesn't want to, because to not fight him would be to betray her duty. Maron also starts having trouble with things that are from the time when she was really Jeanne D'Arc, and her life becomes very difficult as she is split between her feelings and her duties... and when she herself is betrayed, what can she do?

ART:
I think the art of Jeanne is simply gorgeous. Arina-sensei likes to draw Maron with a lot of different hairstyles and a lot of different clothing, and it's all incredibly detailed; the eyes in this manga are absolutely HUGE, which has bothered some people I know, but I think it's pretty. The characters are all drawn with great care and detail, and though the art suffers from SBS (shoujo body syndrome) at times, it's still usually very good. (SBS is when the characters are too tall or too thin or too wide or their heads are not attached at the right angle or other things are deformed in an angular, offset way; it seems like this is a common thing in shoujo manga.) The color pages and pencilboards and other color illustrations are always gorgeous; if you have seen the art of the Jeanne anime, it's like 50 times better. The anime is really simple and not as pretty, and the colors are really ugly. The manga puts it to shame.
A random page scan from volume 6.

PLOT:
The plot is quite complicated and a few things are never really explained. The reader also has to infer some of the explanation from things people said earlier; it's never really laid out in one big clear explanation. However, it's not terribly hard to follow; but this is one of those manga where, if you're not reading with a translation or your Japanese is not good, you'll probably have trouble figuring out what's going on. The romantic complications are probably the easiest thing to follow; the whole part of the plot with Jeanne and the angels and the reincarnations and such is a lot more complex and hard to follow if you can't read it well. CAUTION: If you are a die-hard Christian who cannot stand to see the Lord's name taken in vain, this may not be something you'll want to read. Throughout the story are inaccuracies as far as the Christian religion is concerned; I think this plot was based on the IDEA of Christianity and "God" but it really is not always very similar to real Christianity except for on the surface.

CHARACTERS:
I like them all pretty well. This is another area where the anime kinda let the manga down. In the anime, Miyako is a pushy bitchy brat. I really have no idea why Maron is friends with her, because she's just not very pleasant at all. But in the manga, Miyako is quite assertive, yes, but she's not bitchy, just straight-forward and strong-willed. But she can be nice at times and it's very obvious that she cares about Maron. Chiaki was also rather different in the anime. For lack of a better term, he's a lech. He's always flirting outrageously with Maron and just seems kind of sleazy at times; in the manga he's much nicer and though he does flirt a lot, it's a lot cuter. Maron, Finn, and Access seem to be more or less the same, although I haven't seen too much of the anime so I couldn't say for sure. Anyway, I like most of the characters.

DIFFICULTY:
Well... like I said before, with a basic grip of Japanese you can follow the love story part of the plot fairly easily. It's not that complex and the grammar isn't too bad. But when the story starts to talk about Jeanne and reincarnation and duty and so on, the sentence structure is more complex and the vocabulary is harder to translate. This ran in Ribon, so it's not horribly tough or anything, but it might require a fairly good grounding in Japanese before you can read this without trouble. There's not a lot of slang or colloquial speech, which is nice. However, luckily for all you people who don't read Japanese well, there are more or less complete translations up at Checkmate, which is also a really good Jeanne site if you'd like to find out more about it.