Shojo manga’s a growing market right now, and one of the nice side effects of that boom is how we’re starting to see comics that might otherwise never have shown up domestically. I’m still waiting for a domestic edition of one of the most influential shojo stories of them all, Shinji Wada’s Sukeban Deka manga (which spawned a live-action TV series, a slew of movies, and an animated OAV)—but in the meantime there’s Vertical’s publication of Keiko Takemiya’s To Terra…, a title I’d only known about in passing and glimpsed when it was out of translation. Based on what’s in the first volume, it deserves an audience above and beyond just the shojo market, the way Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha deserves an audience outside of existing manga readers.

Much of the story in the first volume is divided between two plotlines. The first is the story of Jomy, growing up on Ataraxia, one of Earth’s far-future colonies, where society is rigidly controlled by computers as a way to suppress problems before they begin. When children come of age, they’re tested via a process called the "Maturity Check" to insure that they will not pose difficulties to society at large—for instance, by showing signs of having telepathic ability. (Those who pass the Maturity Check are welcomed into society; but those who fail run the risk of becoming social rejects—a plot element probably echoed directly from the fears of a great many young Japanese trying desperately to pass their entrance exams and not be seen as failures!)