One of the things that Moyoco Anno utilizes extremely well is her sublime sense of space. I think this applies to everyone within the Kyoko Okazaki tradition, although I’ve only really seen a few others. Their panels are ridiculously packed with every kind of decoration, tons and tons of side-jokes, and provide non-stop stimulation to the senses while creating this incredible visual tension by transitioning from fragmented frames to large spreads. I bet anybody aiming to get into the industry or make their own work could learn a ton simply by analyzing the frame-structure of those like Anno and George Asakura.

The result of such a tightly packed frame is that in a mere 8 volumes, I’ve felt like I’ve been through every single kind of fantasy world possible. The story goes from a school setting, to haunted mansions, to city streets, to twisted landscapes, to beaches, to deserts, all culminating in a majestic finale that ties everything together.

The plot itself is like the art of those Golden Age Illustrators like Kay Nielsen, and other fairy tales, mixed together and turned into pure crack. People fall in love and experience heartbreak at mach speed, fight magical NTR battles, and do a whole lot of general fucking around while ruminating about the mysteries of the world and what romance entails. Since, in the world of Sugar Sugar Rune, the heart itself becomes an actual device for manipulation – you have a lot of battles and scenarios that also double as multi-layered metaphors about stuff like depression, abusive relationships etc… etc.. Furthermore all this fits into Anno’s writing power, since she’s done all sorts of genres including josei stuff like In Clothes Called Fat and seinen stuff like Hataraki Man before.

Also important is the fact that Moyoco Anno actually knows how to draw fashion, and has tons of fun creating all sorts of gothic-chic outfits and fairytale designs for the whole host of magic land inhabitants. This all fits in her drawing style – and the movement and anatomy of all the characters are so lucidly sketched out that they’re able to express almost every kind of expression in the most melodramatic flair possible. Shit, these are what magical girls should actually look like in the 21st century.

There’s a reason why the other big name Anno, Hideaki Anno, considered his wife to be better than him. Moyoco Anno is simply one of the most versatile creators in the industry, while Hideaki had to become disillusioned and leave us with only Eva and KareKano to have mere hints of what he could have achieved. And Hataraki Man, although less memorable artistically and expressionistically, is simply a hundred times more mature than Eva at teaching people how to actually deal with your life.