Tanpopo Ohanami is an ordinary high school student with one friend she cannot tell anyone about: Shade, a shadow fiend who has been beside her since she was small. In this world fiends are humanity's villains, and magical girls exist to fight them. Then Tanpopo is asked to become a magical girl. The blurb for the first Japanese volume puts her answer in one line: being protected is over.
Kaeru Mizuho launched the series in Shogakukan's shojo magazine Sho-Comi in issue 18 of 2024, on sale 20 August, and the first Japanese volume did not appear until 25 April 2025. VIZ Media had started English simulpub chapters on VIZ Manga in October 2024, so English readers were half a year into the story before Japan had a book to buy. The collected English edition runs under the Shojo Beat imprint, and volume 3 came out on 1 September at 160 pages. Its blurb has a new magical girl, Peony, taking up her sword beside Dandelion and Shade against the cinema fiends while Ice, a fiend who shares a dark past with Shade, watches from the shadows.
Sho-Comi's official page files the series as neo dark fantasy. The pitch is not a magical girl defeating fiends but two people who ought to be enemies forming a pair and fighting for the ones they love, a story of light and shadow. According to VIZ's author bio, Mizuho was born in Kanagawa Prefecture, graduated from the manga department of Tokyo Polytechnic University in its sixteenth class, and debuted with the one-shot Sayonara Refrain in Sho-Comi in March 2018.
Japan reached volume 5 on 26 August 2026. Its blurb picks up a few days after the fight at the theatre: a fiend has appeared that ignores humans and attacks only magical girls, and the pair set out for a mysterious remote island to find out who is behind this magical girl hunt. Shogakukan bills it as the start of a new arc.
New chapters are published on VIZ Manga in English. In Japanese the series is on Sho-Comi's official site and Shogakukan's Flower Comics site, and the Flower Comics YouTube channel carries the PV made for the release of volume 1.
