R&R: When It Changed: Four Shojo Stories, A, A’, and Love Song

Features Shaenon Garrity | August 25, 2026 Midway through the 1990s, the sausage festiest decade of American comics, Viz Media miraculously published three volumes’ worth of shojo (girls’) and josei (women’s) manga, collected in Shojo Stories, A, A', and Love Song. These books, the Holy Trilogy of old shojo, affected my college-age self too deeply for me to judge them objectively. It’s as useless to ask me for a cool-headed analysis of A, A', as it is to ask any male Gen X nerd for a cool-headed analysis of the silent issue of G.I. Joe. Subjectively, of course, they are the three greatest comics ever made. These manga were a passion project of Rachel Thorn, then a freelance translator. Thorn recalls suggesting to vice president and editor-in-chief Satoru Fuji, around 1990, that Viz skip the comic book direct market and sell trade paperbacks directly to bookstores. “Satoru laughed out loud,” she says. “He said, ‘Those stores would never carry our stuff. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a foot in the door in those places?’” But Fuji was open to publishing shojo manga. Viz had already looked into acquiring Akemi Yoshida’s street drama/queer romance Banana Fish, but it was ti...