In All Designs Begun on Earth Below!

Fresh off the heels of Moyashimon's conclusion, we are pleased to present the start of Mayayuki Ishikawa's currently ongoing series Madowanai Hoshi with the first three chapters! After working on Moyashimon over the past year, it was hard to say goodbye to a series we put so much love and effort into, so we had been planning for a while to start working on Madowanai Hoshi once Moyashimon was finished, so here we are. The story is as follows:

In the future, Earth has become so polluted that humanity is forced to live in enclosed shelters. In Japan, the shelters are divided between the "inside", which caters to the country's lucrative anime industry, and the "outside", where most people work to support the people working on the "inside". S-zawa is one such "outside" worker whose job involves sending messages into space. One day, he's approached by the ailing embodiment of Earth to send a message before she collapses. Shortly after the message is sent, other girls similar to Earth start showing up at S-zawa's workplace in an effort to help Earth, but he has a thing or two to learn about what the planets and their moons are really like.

Readers of Moyashimon will notice similarities with that series, some subtle, others obvious, but you don't have to have read Moyashimon to enjoy Madowanai Hoshi, although if you liked Moyashimon, Madowanai Hoshi should also be right up your alley. You can almost think of it as Moyashimon, but instead of microbes and fermentation as motifs, you have planets, their moons, and astronomy. It's pretty much the closest thing to a spiritual successor to Moyashimon, so it's well-worth the effort that goes into scanlating it.

Regarding the title, Madowanai Hoshi (惑わない星) can be loosely translated as "unwandering star", and is closely related to the etymology of "planet" and by extension the typical Japanese word for planet, "wakusei" (惑星). Ancient Greeks originally called planets "wandering stars" (planētes asteres) or simply "wanderers" (planētai), which is where "planet" comes from. Meanwhile, the word "wakusei" can literally mean "wandering star". However, in Japanese, "hoshi" (星) is also often used to refer to planets, and it's used as a suffix to the names of the planets in Japanese using hoshi's alternate reading of "-sei": Mercury is "suisei" (水星), Venus is "kinsei" (金星), etc. Earth is the exception to this, which is "chikyuu" (地球). So, Madowanai Hoshi could also be translated as "unwavering planet". Also, the series has a Greek subtitle, γνῶθι σεαυτόν, which translates as "know thyself", possibly another reference to the Greek origin of "planet".

So we hope you enjoy Masayuki Ishikawa's next work. Currently, the first two volumes have been released, with the third volume slated for release in the next couple of months, so there's a lot of material to go through for the time being. The first chapter also starts with several color pages.

Madowanai Hoshi ch. 1: Mediafire, Dropbox
Madowanai Hoshi ch. 2: Mediafire, Dropbox
Madowanai Hoshi ch. 3: Mediafire, Dropbox