Cinderalla

Plot

Cinderalla works as a waitress in her father's yakitori restaurant. After he dies from overeating, he returns as a zombie. Her father remarries the hungry zombie Caroline, and Cinderalla gains two elder zombie stepsisters, Akko and Aki. While searching for a bra she is making for Aki, she falls in love with a male zombie.

She and her mouse friend Setsuko rescue a starving fairy from twin boys planning to dissect her. The fairy cannot return home until she regains her magical powers, so Cinderalla lets her stay. Cinderalla learns the zombie she loves is the Prince, a singer with an upcoming performance. She saves for a ticket but is rejected because only zombies may attend.

The fairy transforms her into a zombie, and she goes to the performance. The Prince accidentally falls on her, causing her to lose consciousness. She wakes in bed with him, and they have sex. As dawn approaches, she dresses and leaves, losing her right eye when she trips.

Development and release

After her first major manga Pure Trance, Junko Mizuno wrote and illustrated Cinderalla. Her manager, a graphic designer, and an editor wanted to profit from her work and believed she lacked skill in original stories, so they asked her to adapt pre-existing narratives like European fairy tales. Mizuno had read these tales as a child and found them scary. She completed Cinderalla in half a year without an assistant.

Without a computer, she could not color the manga herself and was unhappy with the coloring done by Koushinsya's designer. The manga was published directly as a bound volume in Japan by Koushinsya in February 2000. Mizuno later obtained rights to manage foreign editions. Viz Media licensed it for English translation in 2001, serializing it in Pulp from May 2001 to July 2002, then releasing a left-to-right volume in July 2002.

Mizuno reversed the art and redrew some pages, recolored with soft colors, and chose pulp paper to evoke a cheap American comic. Translations include French by Imho in 2004, Portuguese by Editora Conrad in 2006, and Spanish by Imho in 2008.

Reception

The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales noted the manga's irony and dark humor, and its ending reminiscent of Charles Perrault's version. Fausto Salvadori of Folha de S.Paulo called it a sarcastic, bizarre, dark humor version of Cinderella like an episode of The Powerpuff Girls written and directed by Coffin Joe. Rebeca Fernández of Público described it as a union of Hello Kitty and Chucky.