Bogle Bogle Volume 1 by Shino Taira and Yuko Ichiju (amazon)
One of the nice things about manga is there are so many subgenres. Manga has you covered if you like reading about fighting priests, vampire vampire hunters, warped student-teacher relationships, girls with magical transforming powers, or high school students forced to cross-dress for inexplicable reasons. One popular subgenre is stories about phantom thieves, where normal high school kids dress up in black and sneak out at night to perform daring heists.
In Bogle Asuka starts at a new school. She has a secret buried in her past; she used to be the phantom thief known as Cat, but she has decided to retire. She moved to a new high school because of her detective brother’s new job. As Asuka starts her day she gets lost on her new campus and she runs into two rather attractive boys.
The first is Ryoma, the captain of the Kendo Club. Although he is intense, abrupt, and brooding he is actually hiding his sensitive soul. The reader can figure this out rather quickly when Asuka stumbles across him when he is gardening and he asks her not to tell anyone about his hobby because it is a “threat to my honor.” Asuka has a poor sense of direction because she immediately gets lost again, and is helped by Masato, a irrepressible and flirtatious boy with a habit of building gadgets.
It turns out that the phantom thief group Bogle is run out of the school, with a teacher acting as the leader. Asuka’s gymnastic talents make her a natural to be recruited to join the group. They run a web site where people can request that their precious items be returned to them.
There’s a somewhat typical plot about Asuka being bullied at school by jealous girls, and later on she intervenes in the life of an old woman in her neighborhood. I wasn’t finding anything particularly gripping about either the storylines or the art, although I might flip through the second volume to see if it improves on the first. It looks like Bogle is a three volume series, so if you are looking for a short dose of phantom thievery, it might be worth checking out.
Asuka reluctantly joins Bogle:
