James Nicoll Reviews

2024’s Witch Hat Atelier, Volume 13 is the thirteenth tankōbon of Kamome Shirahama’s Witch Hat Atelier fantasy manga series. Witch Hat Atelier (Tongari Bōshi no Atelier in the original Japanese) has been serialized in Kodansha’s Monthly Morning Two magazine since July 2016. The English translation of Volume 12 first appeared in 2025.

Imprisoned and stripped of his rank for misusing magic, cunning old Engendale orchestrated his escape by unleashing a vast, blood-sucking monster to distract his jailors while he fled. This very nearly perfect plan would have succeeded, were it not for plucky young Coco and her mentor, Qifrey.

Intercepting and confronting the old reprobate is easy enough. Surviving the encounter is another matter.

The witches adhere to a strict code of ethics aimed at concealing from the masses the full range of uses to which magic can be put. Restrictions include combat magic, as such magic can easily be scaled up into weapons of mass destruction¹.

Engendale sees no reason to hold back.

Enjoying as he does the obvious advantage of wielding lethal magic against unarmed opponents, Engendale is confident of victory. Too confident. He doesn’t realize that cunning can win over raw power He is also fond of the villainous monologue, like so many villains before him. This ends just as well for him as it did for them.

Conflicts with monsters like Engendale can result in mass casualties. Magic could help here… were it not that medical magic is a subset of body-changing magic. Body-altering magic is easily abused, hence strictly banned. The surviving victims will have to depend on mundane medicine.

Except… there is one well-known exception to the ban on bodily alteration. Using it in this context would require the ingenuity to see a more general application and the persuasiveness to convince narrow-minded magical authorities to permit the innovation.

~oOo~

Once the cunning idea is revealed, a witch off-handedly comments that they’ve thought of over two dozen ways to abuse the method in the few minutes since they first heard the proposal. Entirely fair, as previous volumes showed just how the spell can be misused (deliberately or otherwise). However, here the concept is applied in a way intended to make it hard to misuse. Kudos to Coco and her team.

This issue of the manga highlighted… not a plot hole², exactly, but an issue that must have been managed off-stage. The event that brought witches and mundanes together was a festival of new magical products. The manga suggests that each new product is being revealed for the very first time. Surely, the last thing the witches would want is for a new idea to be first shown to the masses, rather than some sort of magical consumer protection agency?

I suspect that the big mistake the witches made is to permit magic to be used at all, let alone as widely as it is. There’s huge motivation for loophole abuse and for fragrant rules violations and as has been established over and over and over, magic lends itself to apocalyptic results. Really, doomsday is inevitable and all the rules accomplish is to alter the timing somewhat. That would be pretty depressing if there were any real-world analog.

Happily, the focus here isn’t on the logical, long-term consequences of handing humans magic, but on plucky Coco and her friends, and their so-far-sufficient short-term efforts to find solutions. The lesson here is that happiness can be found even in the most trying circumstances if you adopt sufficiently short planning horizons. Next week can’t worry you if you never think about next week.

As with previous volumes, Witch Hat Atelier, Volume 13 is beautiful to look at and fun to read. If only there were shorter gaps between volumes.

Witch Hat Atelier, Volume 13 is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: For example, someone could unleash a blood-sucking kaiju.

2: What might be a plot hole is that the brim hat witches, who want to break the pact of secrecy, don’t simply put up posters revealing the biggest magical secret, which is that anyone with the right tools can perform magic. Instead, they are quite careful about who learns that particular secret.

Perhaps that is not a plot hole so much as it is blatant hypocrisy.