Over the years Swiss AGMüller have published quite a number of tarot packs, some rather trivial,
others like the Akron Tarot, outstanding in art, concept and production quality. Only a pity, that
this tarot and the comprehensive text by Akron has never reached the English speaking market.
AGMüller's latest tarot is "Magic Manga Tarot". The Japanese manga drawing style developed in the
mid 20th century, originally used for comic strips. Regular daily-, weekly or monthly comic strips
were, after the stories they told came to an end, compiled into huge books of up to 7-800 pages.
The popularity of the drawing style grew hastily and took many directions, including violence
and extreme sexuality, even bordering on pedophilia. It also spread to other media than comic
books, one being tarot cards. Tarot was a fairly unknown concept in Japan until the 1980's where
tarot decks, manufactured by Japanese publishers, began to show up. These early Japanese decks were
all modeled after the European or American tradition and they only rarely depicted characters
with a defined Japanese look. At the end of the 20th century the manga style, however, took over
the Japanese tarot mass media market with a wealth of manga style decks published.
From Japan the manga style spread to the Western countries with France as a forerunner. Several
established painters were inspired by the simple style and had success in adopting it. The artist of
the "Magic Manga Tarot" is Swiss. Her name is Viviane. That's all the publisher wants to tell about
her. She has a website, which is confusing and just as empty for facts. There is a multilingual
booklet with the deck. When will publishers learn that endless and repeated listings of traditional
card interpretations is not what the "little white book" should be about? Customers, who buy a
tarot deck these days, know all that already. Who is this "Viviane"? What is the idea with this
particular deck? Why is there a pirate on the four of pentacles, for example? The deck possibly
attempt to tell a story, but this story is kept a secret. Looking at the single cards, they are
quite well done (even though manga is not my cup of tea) and the artist is competent. The outcome
is, however, just a stack of 78 isolated pictures with no coherence at all.
Magic Manga Tarot
Artwork by Viviane
78 card Tarot deck (size: 2.75" x 4.75"), booklet
Publisher: AGMüller
2007 - Distributed by U.S. Games Systems, Inc.
ISBN-978-1-57281-610-7
Over the years Swiss AGMüller have published quite a number of tarot packs, some rather trivial,
others like the Akron Tarot, outstanding in art, concept and production quality. Only a pity, that
this tarot and the comprehensive text by Akron has never reached the English speaking market.
From Japan the manga style spread to the Western countries with France as a forerunner. Several
established painters were inspired by the simple style and had success in adopting it. The artist of
the "Magic Manga Tarot" is Swiss. Her name is Viviane. That's all the publisher wants to tell about
her. She has a website, which is confusing and just as empty for facts. There is a multilingual
booklet with the deck. When will publishers learn that endless and repeated listings of traditional
card interpretations is not what the "little white book" should be about? Customers, who buy a
tarot deck these days, know all that already. Who is this "Viviane"? What is the idea with this
particular deck? Why is there a pirate on the four of pentacles, for example? The deck possibly
attempt to tell a story, but this story is kept a secret. Looking at the single cards, they are
quite well done (even though manga is not my cup of tea) and the artist is competent. The outcome
is, however, just a stack of 78 isolated pictures with no coherence at all.