ガールズ＆パンツァー リトルアーミー / Girls Und Panzer: Little Army
Summary
This is the story of Miho Nishizumi in her elementary school days, taking place six years prior to the events in Girls und Panzer. Having been raised in a prestigious household that adheres strictly to the values of tankery, life isn’t easy for young Miho. With an older sister who has already risen to great heights, Miho has some very large shoes to fill. Together with a group of new friends, and a blossoming interest in tankery, Miho will set out on a road that may very well change her future.
Availability
Physical: Amazon
Ebook: Bookwalker
Personal Opinion
Honestly, now I’ve started reading manga I went looking for the manga associated with my favourite anime franchises and spotted that Little Army has full furigana and at least from my read through of the first half of chapter 1, not overly difficult language. There is some domain knowledge, but they don’t seem to expect the JP audience to know them either as they go out of their way to explain it (e.g.:
)
Pros and Cons for the Book Club
Pros
- A recognizable franchise, with a story that’s new if you’ve watched it and decoupled if you haven’t.
- Near-full furigana (it does drop it with some effect fonts, like the image caption on page 3, text on diagrams, or a character talking without a bubble to indicate excited babbling)
Cons
- Some pages can be relatively text-dense, there’s not as many “free” pages as in the last two manga. Pages 2/3 are actually near the top end in terms of density (esp kanji density), but that’s not to say there’s not plenty of other pages that are 80% of the way there.
- Tank/vehicle specific language, though it seems a lot of it is explained
- Based on the description, volume 2 might go into more spoiler backstory stuff if you haven’t watched the anime.
Pictures
Additional Pages
A standard-ish page and one of the somewhat frequent large spreads
Page with some tank/vehicle lingo being explained:
Two typical pages in a row:
Difficulty Poll
How much effort would you need to read this book?
- No effort at all
- Minimal effort
- Moderate effort
- Substantial effort
- So much effort my head might explode
- I don’t know
- I am an experienced reader, so this is not much effort for me