The Gundam franchise has achieved multiple hits since the 2010s, with popular titles like Gundam Build Fighters and Iron-Blooded Orphans. However, Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury may be one of the best in the last ten years. The anime became a hit in 2022 and 2023, earning praise for its animation, story, characters, and heavy LGBTQ themes. The show drew in a crowd that typically didn’t watch mecha shows, reaching record-breaking sales in 2022 thanks to the Gundam Model kits (Gunpla). Unfortunately, The Witch from Mercury only lasted 25 episodes, ending on July 2nd, 2023.
Luckily, an alternate universe spin-off manga called Gundam: The Witch from Mercury Frontier of Youth will be released on May 23rd. While the original show took place in a sci-fi future with giant mechas and space colonies, Frontier of Youth will be set in near-future Japan. The anime’s co-protagonists, Suletta Mercury and Miorine Rembran, are re-imagined as normal high school students on Earth. Comic Newtype will publish the new manga and has shared two new character images based on the leads. They are both in Earthbound school uniforms, a contrast to the school uniforms they wore in the show. Suletta holds a broom in her character profile image, exemplifying the character’s witch-y status.
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Frontier of Youth Has an All-Star Creative Team
Writer HISADAKE, the Setting Assistant for Witch from Mercury, will serve as the author for Frontier of Youth. The manga’s art will be handled by Hiro Hato, an artist known for their work on Misumi-san wa Misukasenai and Inu to Yuusha wa Kazaranai. Hato has expressed being a fan of the Witch from Mercury anime and is looking forward to working on the spin-off. Witch from Mercury has other spin-off titles, including a light novel adaptation and a side-story manga co-written by HISADAKE called Vanadis Heart. There’s also a spin-off novel named Cradle Planet by Ichiro Okouchi, published in the Fall of 2022.
The Gundam franchise earns most of its money through Gunpla and other merchandise sales. Gunpla tends to do well financially, especially in Asia countries like Japan and China, but Witch from Mercury‘s success still outpaced many modern-day Gundam’s popularity. The Witch from Mercury, specifically the Gundam Aerial, contributed to the high profit margins of that year. The Aerial became one of the best-selling gunplas in the brand’s history, matching sales numbers to other popular leading Gundams like the Barbatos, Strike Gundam, and the RX-78 Gundam. Bandai Namco confirmed that the Gundam franchise’s profits increased by two billion yen, equivalent to 15 million USD, during its 2023 Fiscal Year.
Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury stars Suletta Mercury, a new transfer student at a military academy. Over twenty years ago, the Mobile Suit Development Council banned GUND, an advanced brain-computer interface that allows people to control mechanical appendages outside their body. This led to the destruction and massacre of the Vanadis research, with people using GUND declared as “witches.” Suletta’s Aerial is secretly a Gundam, and she uses it to fight in school-sponsored duels to keep her engagement with Miorine Rembran, daughter of the head of the Council.
H/T: Oricon US Website
