Good morning, Rising Sun readers. Today’s post is about Toki-Meca, a manga that unfortunately never saw official release in the United States.

Toki-Meca is a mecha comedy by Naoko Takeuchi, the creator of Sailor Moon. It’s also the first work she has completed since then, having lost the manuscript for PQ Angels, doing the tone art for Hunter x Hunter and doing a collaboration with that work’s author (and her husband) and having a brief falling-out with her publisher, Kodansha.

In the series, a young girl named Mimi enters a awkward situation when she meets a girl named Meca, who claims to be her very best friend. It turns out that Meca is a robot with two bodies, constructed by her friend Hoshiko after she moved to the States seven years earlier. Even though Meca is Mimi’s friend, her desire to be an idol and have 1000 friends puts them both into unwanted complications. The series is fairly entertaining and fast-paced, starting with a bad-hair day for Mimi, parodying Sleeping Beauty and even going into the “don’t talk to strangers” moral in the first chapter alone.

Many of Takeuchi’s fans know that her works have beautiful, shining artwork. And Toki-Meca is no exception to that rule. The characters are wide-eyed, well-detailed and sometimes experience simplifications in anatomy for comical moments. The backgrounds and visual effects sparkle with life, and everything is so well put together. It never looks too different from her earlier works like The Cherry Project or Sailor Moon.

Toki-Meca, available in a English fan-translation at missdream.org, is a solid work that can be recommended to comedy fans, mecha fans, and Sailor Moon fans.