The creator of one of my favorite offbeat horror manga says the series isn’t ending, Google just decided it was
Mieruko-chan is a delightfully twisted comedy horror manga about a girl who can see and hear spirits – often deeply warped and grotesque spirits – but must pretend she can’t in order to avoid their attention. It’s hit volume 10 in the original Japanese manga, the English translation is up to nine official volumes, and there’s more to come. So you can imagine the surprise of creator Tomoki Izumi when readers started asking him about the end of the manga, only to find that Google was to blame.
In a (machine translated) tweet, Izumi notes that “I often wondered why people thought Mieruko-chan was finished, and when I looked into it, I found that Google had ended it on its own,” sharing a screenshot of search results indicating that the manga had ended with volume 10.
見える子ちゃん完結してると思われることが多くて何でだろうと調べてみたらGoogleに勝手に終わらせられてた件 pic.twitter.com/lvPVRTNRLqJuly 9, 2024
Judging from the UI, the error seems to have come from a “related questions” result in Google, with this summary (again, per machine translation) specifying “All volumes (Volumes 1-10 complete).” In replies to Izumi’s tweet, several readers said they were relieved to hear that the abrupt ending was just a mistake.
It’s unclear from this screenshot whether this was a run-of-the-mill error or specifically the result of Google’s dalliance with AI search summaries, which have burped up countless falsehoods already. The important takeaway is that, no, Mieruko-chan wasn’t canceled and isn’t over.
Published in English by Yen Press, Mieruko-chan stars Miko Yotsuya, the titular “girl that sees them.” While driven by lighthearted and comedic scenes featuring Miko and her friends, the series stands out thanks to the repulsive creatures which frequently infest panels. It’s something I find myself reading just to see what abomination comes up next. It received an anime adaptation in 2021 from studio Passione which, while inexplicably horny compared to the tamer, more comedy- and tension-focused manga, did give us some solidly animated creature designs.