Witchcraft Works is a Japanese manga series that has been adapted into a graphic novel. It is written and illustrated by Ryu Mizunagi. The story revolves around teenage boy Honoka Takamiya, who finds himself caught in a world of witches and dangerous magic. Honoka discovers that he is the key to protecting a powerful witch named Ayaka Kagari, who happens to be the most popular girl in his school. As their bond grows stronger, Honoka and Ayaka must face numerous threats from other witches who want to steal Ayaka's powers. The graphic novel combines elements of comedy, romance, and action to create an exciting and engaging story.
The blue levers are your friends. But they are magic too. They partake of a particular school of magic: the impetuous. They are moody and have their own ideas about flying, and will—out of your hands at whim if you don't carefully secure them either on a spoke of the wheel (they have little slots to do that) or by holding your knee up against them (neither is a guarantee); in a sulky mood they might aim for your face. Alayna made a suggestion. Because I was concentrating, I didn't quite hear her, but I think she said something like, "Don't squish. Swoosh. Turn the lever over." Whatever she said helped.
After the death of my fourth, the great love of my life, I am trying to find the me that never existed before by learning to change bike tires which turns out to be significantly harder than I thought when someone moves you from the taller stool, to the shorter one where you can rest the wheel easier on the floor then it is no insignificant thing when she offers you water. Taking the front wheel off is easier than taking the back wheel off, she says, and proves it by unscrewing the axle and gently sliding the wheel out of the frame.
The graphic novel combines elements of comedy, romance, and action to create an exciting and engaging story. The artwork in Witchcraft Works is visually stunning, with detailed illustrations of magical battles and adorable character designs. The protagonist Honoka is portrayed as a typical high school student who suddenly finds himself thrust into a world of danger and excitement.
Magic in the Bike Shop
For a second I thought it was a picture of Wayne. I didn't realize that Alayna Zaydel, who works in the downtown bike shop, Motorless Motion, had taken it just to make sure the iPad would take the few pictures I'd hoped to get. My mouth fell and my heart stumbled. No, it doesn't look like him—he was as goofy and thin as a marionette made of pencils. But there's something. Perhaps it's just the tilt of the head. Perhaps just the way the shop was so quiet in February when people aren't zooming around town on bikes and we think of other, interior journeys, and imagine the journey that comes at the end of our life and leads us to the beloved dead. Maybe it was just the way the floor seemed to have expanded, extending from the workspace to the door, seeming, in this photo, three times as long as normal, a tunnel of quiet seeking the light in which he might be smiling at me as I stare and imagine him looking back at me, the way I imagine him behind every door, or in the next room, or running errands in town, each time my heart breaking and, yes, also singing.
I'm holding a wheel.
Bicycle Wheel Spinning Wheel in Dehli
I've seen a hundred pictures of men and women in India using bike wheels to spin cotton. And for thirty years wooden wheels that spun first wool and then cotton were the magic center of my house. No, our house. Wayne came without a loom, but it wasn't long before the clack and ripple of Gisela (he named his looms) made the empty space in our former bedroom a lure for pixies, sprites, and magical wingèd invisible insects and birds, entities who inhabit that reality just beyond the audible. Alayna, The Magician I'd spin fleece into yarn. Sometimes he'd take my threads, my yarn, and weave something that proved that magic turns the gears of this clock-mad, time-roiled world; well, at least the textile room had something shy of tangible that charmed—charmed in the olden sense of the word where it means to put a spell on you; and he produced glamorous scarves, glamorous in the olden sense of the word–having an appearance that does not reflect what a thing really is. Yes, colored string charmed by a weaver and his bewitched loom does look really different than what it really is. There's something of the weaver that lingers in the hand and color, something of the animal or plant that once lived and grew on the great blue ball, lived and is gone, but remembered in the warmth it provides, by the color with which it encourages. A Descendent of My Sheep at True North Farm Everyone I know who has spun or woven has experienced that glammoured charm. Suddenly you feel transported in time. You do have a moment where you feel that you have spun yarn in the eerie before, that you have woven cloth in the transcendent not yet.
One of Wayne's Iridescent Scarves So there I am sitting in Motorless Motion, Mt. Pleasant's estimable bike shop. Learning to change inner tubes and tires on my Scene 3 vts, Isabel. I named my bicycle because she is my wheel and Wayne's loom now. We don't time travel together. It's all about space and distance and from here to there. We all know now that time and space are one thing. Holding a bicycle wheel gives you an entirely different feel than what you feel when you are pedaling your spinning wheel. It's no longer about then and the to be. It's about now.
Isabel is an electric-assist pedaled bicycle. She has a motor.
My Old Wheel "I know, I know," Mike, the owner of the shop told me. "My contract, when I purchased the shop, has a requirement that I keep the name for ten years!" I thought that perhaps he could keep the name as is without ethical qualm if he just sold motors to people like me, people who have: had a quadruple bypass, a sigmoid colon resection, back surgery; who have seizure disorders like me; who have something called Cerebellar Ataxia, which is a neurodegenerative disorder that… Well, he's not yet doing a big business with the electric motor pedal assists. I think I was the second to buy one—or rather, the generous people who contributed to the fund to buy it for me. (And I still am going to therapy hoping that one day I may feel worthy.) And there are only two more waiting to be sold—if you're nearby, test drive one. Imagine a bicycle that feels like it's being propelled forward by a gentle wind; it seems to have an invisible sail spun and woven by, umm, gentle Vikings.
When I walked into the shop, Alayna was descending the steps from the loft office into the showroom. She's worked for Mike for four years.
"How did it happen? Did you have a passion for bikes first? Or did you want to learn a trade and bikes called to you? Or was it simply an available job and you thought, well, hey, maybe I'll get it?" Alayna Works Her Magic at Motorless Motion in Downtown Mt. Pleasant, Michigan
"All three," she said.
She offered me the tall stool when I had just come in. She knows my back gets sore quickly when I stand. Twice during out lesson in changing to winter tires, she got me a cup of water. People who are passionate about textiles, and people who are passionate about bicycles, are kind. They want to share their craft and their joy.
You know all those Bible stories where men meet mysterious women at wells and some kind of magic happens—they get married, or someone reads someones's mind. "That shit is real," my New Orleans and Mississippi friends would say. "You meet somebody on the beach, in a bar, or at a baptism, you better pay attention cause where there's spirits there's ghosts and where there's water it can get deep!" It is no insignificant matter if Jesus asks a woman who's had five husbands to give him water. Some of my closets friends refer to me as the Wife of Bath, Chaucer's baudy character modeled on the Samaritan Woman by the Well who had five husbands. After the death of my fourth, the great love of my life, I am trying to find the me that never existed before by learning to change bike tires which turns out to be significantly harder than I thought—when someone moves you from the taller stool, to the shorter one where you can rest the wheel easier on the floor—then it is no insignificant thing when she offers you water. When you are grieving, the smallest kindnesses are oases in your desert of grief. You are transported, if you allow yourself to be, from the razor-toothed winter of Michigan, to a middle eastern Samaritan well where a woman with a personality that all but eclipses Jesus is shriek-laughing, And giving you water.
My Brother Sean in His Shop with my Sister Alexis Neither Alayna and I would laugh out loud. Our personalities would not eclipse anyone or each other. We chuckled a bit now and then. But she had work to do. Magic to perform. To teach me how to do a mechanical thing. Go ahead. Laugh.
It will amuse my family when I can easily change a bike tire. My brother Sean, who is mechanical, and even has his own garage, is also creative—a wizard with a guitar and any song by John Prine, but I, who write and compose, do not share his practical world skills. What we do share, I think, is a belief in some higher power and a certainty that there are magical people. People who can teach you, if they find you worthy, how to how to spin silk, how to change bike tires.
"How many older people have you taught to do this?" I ask, after someone around my age—I am 67—has popped in mostly to say hi and then point out the Bar Mitts on the handlebar of a bike. Honestly, I didn't get over to inspect them, but if they're fixed mittens on the bike I can't see how they wouldn't cause you to crash, albeit with warmer hands. He asks, "Do you think it's a pun on Bar Mitzvah?"
Alayna hoists Isabel onto a bike stand. ET, Phone Home For a second, it looks like it's flying through the air. Alayna has worked magic again.
"Taking the front wheel off is easier than taking the back wheel off," she says, and proves it by unscrewing the axle and gently sliding the wheel out of the frame. She's clearly done this thousands of times.
"I'll put it back in and then you can try."
The woman who first taught me to spin denied for a year that I was her worst student ever. But then I got really, really good and when I asked her again, Claudia said, "Oh, yeah, Harry—I thought you were nuts! Hundreds of sheep and you didn't seem to have a single spinner's cell in your body!" I'm glad she told me that, because taking the wheel out was awkward. Deflating the Inner Tube Not nearly as awkward as it would be putting it back in. But I knew no matter how hard it was and how many times it took me to get it right that I would, eventually, find myself at ease doing it. Even showing someone else how to do it. "The first time, it's always a little bit hard," she says. "But you'll get it."
I won't go through the whole process here. But basically—you let the air out of the inner tube by opening the nozzle that sticks through the inside rim off the wheel. She let me do that. In fact, she either had me do the next thing, or she did it and then made me redo it.
After the air is out you have to take the tire off the wheel. You do this with bike tire levers. The most famous are the beloved Park Tool Company Blues. It Looks Easy… The edge of the tire has a thick wire in it that locks into a lip in the wheel, and you have to get over the lip and under the bead to start levering the tire over just one side of the wheel, and you go around the whole wheel doing that.
The blue levers are your friends. But they are magic too. They partake of a particular school of magic: the impetuous. They are moody and have their own ideas about flying, and will—out of your hands at whim if you don't carefully secure them either on a spoke of the wheel (they have little slots to do that) or by holding your knee up against them (neither is a guarantee); in a sulky mood they might aim for your face. Alayna made a suggestion. Because I was concentrating, I didn't quite hear her, but I think she said something like, "Don't squish. Swoosh. Turn the lever over." Whatever she said helped.
Getting the inner tube and tire back on—it's about ten times harder the first time you do it. But I did it.
A helmeted guy with a long red beard came in and chatted with Mike. I introduced myself and asked, "Do you hate electric bikes?" I'd heard a lot of real riders do.
"No," he said, shaking his head. Whether he was shaking it because electric bikes are a reality that one has to deal with now or perhaps just because I asked the question, I don't know.
"Maybe I'll be well enough someday that I won't need the electric assist." I explained to him that I was new at riding bikes and shared some of my medical history. "I've never really driven a car." I smiled at him. I wasn't in the club. I don't know if electric assist riders can be in the club. But it felt like I was in the right place. And with the perfect person.
New Wheel People like Alayna don't know how magic they are. They find the right stool for you to sit on. They get you cups of water. It matters to them that you understand what they are showing you. And they have, above all, patience. Two hours worth.
"I'm happy to," she says and smiles. And glancing down the empty aisle of the shop, "Doesn't look like there's a lot of people here."
"Do you ever give classes on how to do this stuff where a number of people can learn at the same time?"
"They used to," she says. "But people who'd registered wouldn't show up." Both of us, I think, wonder how people miss the magic in the world.
Turning the bike upside down to rest on its handlebars and seat terrified me. Because my hands shake. My arms shake. My back protests. And I am weak.
"Do you want help?" she asked.
She suggested where to hold and how to rotate the bike over its back wheel. And I did it. It felt like going off the high dive the first time. And then we practiced some of the procedures the way I'd be doing them at home since I don't have a bicycle stand.
I rolled the bike out the front door.
My winter tires were loud. They sounded a little like cellophane being crinkled on the cement. I felt pleased with myself, and grateful to Alayna who had helped me take a next step away from the accident where I lost Wayne, and toward light, where I think I will eventually catch up with him.
TWO DAYS LATER
The snow is zipping past either side of my helmet as my rugged, studded tires roll over patches of ice and small drifts of snow. Cars slither past me, the drivers no doubt wondering what the hell I am doing in 25°F, cold snowfall. My scarf is waving behind me, signaling to the world that I am alive and I am here. My bike is the Argo, and I am in search of the Golden Fleece which I could find nowhere in the Mediterranean, nor in Mississippi. I see glints of silver, but no gold yet. But my wheels are magnificent, and my invisible sails are both giddy and stately. Alayna—thank you for helping me put them on just in time.
After the air is out you have to take the tire off the wheel. You do this with bike tire levers. The most famous are the beloved Park Tool Company Blues. It Looks Easy… The edge of the tire has a thick wire in it that locks into a lip in the wheel, and you have to get over the lip and under the bead to start levering the tire over just one side of the wheel, and you go around the whole wheel doing that.
Ayaka, on the other hand, is a strong and confident character who is fiercely protective of Honoka. The main idea of Witchcraft Works is the power of love and the bonds that can form in the most unexpected circumstances. The story explores themes of friendship, trust, and sacrifice as Honoka and Ayaka face off against powerful enemies to protect each other and the ones they care about. Overall, Witchcraft Works is a gripping graphic novel that will appeal to fans of fantasy and romance genres. Its unique blend of humor, action, and romance makes it a must-read for manga enthusiasts..
Reviews for "Diving into the World of Witches: A Review of Witchcraft Works Graphic Novel"
1. Jessica - 2/5 stars - I was really excited to read "Witchcraft Works" as I am a fan of the fantasy genre, but I was left disappointed. The storyline felt disjointed and rushed, making it difficult for me to fully understand and connect with the characters. Additionally, I found the artwork to be lackluster and uninspiring. Overall, I felt like this graphic novel didn't live up to its potential and left me wanting more depth and substance.
2. Mike - 1/5 stars - "Witchcraft Works" was a major letdown for me. The plot was extremely predictable, with no real surprises or twists. The characters lacked depth and seemed one-dimensional, making it hard to invest in their story. The artwork was also subpar, with mediocre illustrations that failed to capture my attention. I wouldn't recommend this graphic novel to anyone looking for a captivating and original fantasy read.
3. Emily - 2/5 stars - I was initially drawn to "Witchcraft Works" due to its intriguing title and cover art. However, once I started reading, I quickly realized that the story fell flat. The pacing felt off, with moments that dragged on unnecessarily and others that were rushed through without proper explanation. The main characters lacked chemistry, making their relationship feel forced and unconvincing. Overall, I found this graphic novel to be underwhelming and forgettable.
4. Adam - 1/5 stars - "Witchcraft Works" was a tedious and uninteresting read for me. The plot was convoluted and confusing, with too many unnecessary subplots that detracted from the main story. The artwork was also mediocre at best, lacking the attention to detail and creativity that is expected from a graphic novel. Overall, I felt like this was a wasted opportunity to create a captivating and engaging fantasy world. I wouldn't recommend it to fans of the genre.