"Sailor Moon", icon of the "magical girls", Japanese super-heroines

"Sailor Moon", cult manga from the 1990s and model of Magical Girl, comes out in an "eternal" edition at Pika -

Eternal.

The new edition of the manga

could not afford a better title: the Eternal Edition.

Because, yes,

, the most famous of the

, is eternal.

After a first edition at Glénat in 1995, in full animated madness, the manga of Naoko Takeuchi came out in a new version, more faithful, on the occasion of the

in 2003 in Japan (in 2012 in France at Pika), and has therefore the right to an ultimate and definitive edition following the animated

reboot

of 2014.

The French will discover it Wednesday, while other magical girls continue to punctuate the manga news, from

, also reissued at Pika, to

at Black Box, through the latest generation of

, darker: 

,

…

Well, we admit that if we are impatiently awaiting volume 1 of the Eternal Edition of #SailorMoon, the cover of volume 2 already makes us so eager to immerse ourselves in the sequel 🤩 # manga @pikaedition pic.twitter.com / 8x7g528ElM

- Otaku Spirit (@OtakuEsprit) October 6, 2020

"By the power of the lunar prism"

Everyone remembers it.

“By the power of the lunar prism,” Usagi Tsukino, an ordinary and clumsy college girl, transformed into a vigilante Sailor Moon, whose mission was to find the Silver Crystal and protect the princess of the Moon Kingdom.

As Akiko Sugawa, professor at Yokohama University and specialist in media and gender studies, explains in her article

translated on Nippon.com, Sailor Moon is " a

typical of the "transformation fighter", who transforms to face the enemies, with the help of several magic objects, like a specter ".

But the

of the early 1960s was quite different.

Historically,

is considered as the first

, the manga of Mitsuteru Yokoyama but especially the adaptation by Toei Animation in 1966. France will not know Sally until the 1980s with a new anime.

“From

to

, it's pretty much taken for granted that Sally is based on the image of these contemporary Western witches,” comments Akiko Sugawa.

Its other characteristic is not to be human, to come from a magical world.

Caroline, a 10-year-old girl, on the other hand obtains her powers of a magic powder compact in the eponymous series of 1969, followed by updates in the 1980s and then 1990s.

Gigi, Creamy, Emi and the others

These two types of

come in several series and heroines, with the best known, on the one hand

(1982), princess of Neverland Fenarinarsa, sent to Earth to give hope and dreams to humans, and another

(1983), who endowed with a magical pendant transforms into a 16 year old teenage girl and becomes a song star.

Gigi, too, can metamorphose into a young woman, as can

(1984)

or

(1985)

happy birthday tuxedo mask.

and thank you for giving me the most relevant meme of my life.

pic.twitter.com/1UDkBHXZnw

- ジ ャ ッ ク.

(@jackuwu_san) August 3, 2019

The university professor sees it as an attempt by animation studios to capture male viewers, as well as a way for girls to "be able to" try themselves as adults ", temporarily thanks to magic, and thus win the means of self-affirmation and self-expression ”.

Japan then saw what she called the “era of women”, with the emergence of women of power like the political Doi Takako or the singer Matsuda Seiko.

The genre revolution

In 1992,

revolutionized the genre, incorporating certain codes of the

(you see

 ?) And presenting

no longer cute and lonely, but fighting and in groups.

The model settles down to last with

,

,

or

and even inspires Western series like the Italian

or the French

and

A magical girl should be like on the right, but in this manga she transforms into Magical Girl Boy (left) # shock @ AKATAmanga pic.twitter.com/r2O68x0Dvi

- Benoit SALLES (@infestedgrunt) February 26, 2017

For the specialist Akiko Sugawa, if the

was inspired by the modern Western witch, she gave birth to "a very different heroine, by the expression of hybrid and heterogeneous characters, by the search for power, beauty, maternity too, (…), and today through sorority, or the struggle of women breaking the hegemonic heterosexual model, as in

”

We must not forget that

helped many queer children of the 1990s, as the

site recalls

.

The

continues to be a progressive, inclusive figure, and ultimately a (magical) mirror of society, like

, and her high school student transformed into a

virile

, or the

of

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