You know those variant covers comic books are known for? Even though the cover to Oh My Goddess! vol. 46, out this week from Dark Horse, isn’t a variant (it’s the same cover art as the Japanese vol. 46) I almost feel we should have promoted it that way. Think about it—how often do you see the main character of Oh My Goddess! on the cover? In fact he hasn’t shown up since vol. 8, and even then it was in chibi form.
To put things into perspective, vol. 8 of Oh My Goddess! came out in Japan in 1993, whereas vol. 46 came out there in 2013. A little subtraction (addition’s tricky pal) will tell us Keiichi Morisato hasn’t been on the cover of his own manga in twenty years. Well, admittedly, it is called “Oh My Goddess!” and not “Oh My Motorbike Engineer!” but still, I suppose it’s not as bad as The Shinji Ikari Raising Project, where the manga is actually named for him, but he’s been AWOL from the covers since vol. 2 (Shinji is that guy in the distance behind Asuka and Rei).
Nevertheless, vol. 46’s has to be one of my favorite Oh My Goddess! covers ever. Also unusually, it relates directly to this volume’s plot (you may have noticed that not only OMG!, but manga covers in general feel no special need to reflect the events in their volume). It’s also simply a beautiful painting in of itself. And come to think of it, the most appropriate thing about this cover isn’t that it has Keiichi on it at long last, but that it has Keiichi and Belldandy together as the unbreakable couple they are, and have fought through every tribulation to be. There’s only two more volumes of Oh My Goddess! to go after 46, but I hope you won’t mind this spoiler: it has a happy ending.
—Carl Horn
Manga Editor
You know those variant covers comic books are known for? Even though the cover to Oh My Goddess! vol. 46, out this week from Dark Horse, isn’t a variant (it’s the same cover art as the Japanese vol. 46) I almost feel we should have promoted it that way. Think about it—how often do you see the main character of Oh My Goddess! on the cover? In fact he hasn’t shown up since vol. 8, and even then it was in chibi form.
To put things into perspective, vol. 8 of Oh My Goddess! came out in Japan in 1993, whereas vol. 46 came out there in 2013. A little subtraction (addition’s tricky pal) will tell us Keiichi Morisato hasn’t been on the cover of his own manga in twenty years. Well, admittedly, it is called “Oh My Goddess!” and not “Oh My Motorbike Engineer!” but still, I suppose it’s not as bad as The Shinji Ikari Raising Project, where the manga is actually named for him, but he’s been AWOL from the covers since vol. 2 (Shinji is that guy in the distance behind Asuka and Rei).
Nevertheless, vol. 46’s has to be one of my favorite Oh My Goddess! covers ever. Also unusually, it relates directly to this volume’s plot (you may have noticed that not only OMG!, but manga covers in general feel no special need to reflect the events in their volume). It’s also simply a beautiful painting in of itself. And come to think of it, the most appropriate thing about this cover isn’t that it has Keiichi on it at long last, but that it has Keiichi and Belldandy together as the unbreakable couple they are, and have fought through every tribulation to be. There’s only two more volumes of Oh My Goddess! to go after 46, but I hope you won’t mind this spoiler: it has a happy ending.
—Carl Horn
Manga Editor