Pandemic: Unedited Audio & Notes

Manga Details

• Nozomi Temote

  • Other works

    • Cult no Omoide (2013, 1 volume)

      • A fictionalised version of the author’s own experiences joining a cult, published by Kadokawa/Enterbrain. The only complete work by the author.

    • Any other works I can find are either one-shots, instructional exercise routines, or abandoned after a couple chapters, and aren’t really worth the oxygen of explaining. The author seems to be a serial giver-upper. 

• Publishing

  • Run Dates: 

    • January 19, 2015 to November 11, 2015

• Series it replaced

• Not how Comic Earth Star works

• Series that replaced it

  • Not how Comic Earth Star works 

• Series that started at the same time as it

  • Not how Comic Earth Star works

• Well how does Comic Earth Star work?

  • Comic Earth Star was a monthly shonen magazine that lasted 3 ½ years, before becoming a webcomic platform, which is what it was when Pandamic ran. Web manga platforms basically just run stuff without concern for what else is running, so this whole section is just kinda nothing. 

• Chapters/Volumes: 

  • 10 chapters(kinda? Maybe?)/1 volume

About the Manga

• Plot

  • As a child Minita was horribly bullied and as a young adult now works at a sushi restaurant in Koruaken stadium. During a mascot event Minita is tasked with training a new worker named Ishibashi, who is actually there to take secret upskirt photos of an idol named Nanaka who is the presenter at the event. Some rich douchebag goes to give a speech about hard work and the CEO Sigma grindset or something when a panda mascot thankfully walks up and squeezes his skeleton out of his body. A star mascot then uses a sweeping laser beam attack to kill large swaths of people in the audience, including ishibashi oh no not ishibashi! Minita runs out of there as announcements go out all over Japan saying that humanity is over. A police unit has surrounded koruaken as Minita tries to escape. He runs into Nanaka and they decide to team up but they’re attacked by humans wearing panda masks. A cop in a panda mask is about to shoot them when an old wounded cop who isn’t in a panda mask shoots him instead. The cop gives Minita his gun before getting shot by another panda cop. POPCORN JORDAN

  • Minita and Nanaka run to the Ferris wheel to escape. Nanaka is grabbed by a panda guy causing Minita to flash back to when his mom was getting abused and he leaps in to save her. They ride the Ferris wheel to the top where they jump into a swimming pool on a nearby ceiling, a strategy Minita had previously conceived of as a way to escape bullies. Nanaka and Minita take a moment to talk. She correctly determines that he was bullied and she reveals that she also was bullied and attempted suicide 7 times but after the 7th time she decided instead to become a successful idol. The two ran as the star mascot fired a laser beam that separated Tokyo from the rest of Japan. Flash forward about 5 days and Minita finds a girl running from some pandas in a clothing store. He gathers her and some random yakuza guys and brings them to an underground safehouse they found. Minita goes back out to get food when he finds a dead guy with a cell phone in the middle of a call. On the other end is someone named Hiroshi who tells him to take the phone right as it dies. That night the safehouse is attacked by a giant octopus mascot that’s attached to the top half of Ishibashi. They run and soon Minita, Nanaka, and a girl named Rina are separated from the rest as an explosion sends them far away. Nanaka’s legs are pinned under a big rock and Minita dislocates both his arms trying to save her before she just shoots herself in the head. 

  • Rina and Minita find shelter in an abandoned house with a panda whose ears are cut off where she re-sets his bones. The panda sees them but thankfully Minita remembered being repeatedly put in sleeper holds by a bully so he managed to knock the panda unconscious. They see a bus with people and think that maybe Rina’s sister is on it, and Rina says that while some people turned into pandas, and some people were killed, others just straight up vanished from their clothes like it’s the fucking rapture. They get a call from Hiroshi saying that the buses are headed for a stadium filled with humans about to be turned into pandas, and their only hope is to take down a radio tower that connects all the pandas. Oh no, though it’s being guarded by the guy who used to put Minita in sleeper holds in a panda mask! Minita tries to get past him but he puts him in a sleeper hold, so Minita bites through the fucking artery in his arm using his jaw which has been strengthened through years of grinding his teeth and actually kills him before destroying the radio tower. We flash to the stadium and see as the humans start to rebel against the pandas and that’s it. No really that’s the end, that was the final page.

• Characters

  •  Minita Kokage

    • No one notices him

    • Had a hard life with a mom that was abused

    • Finding his courage

    • Tucker on the name thing:

      • The “Minita” thing is a play on how kanji can be read in many ways, and how in the past decade(s) it’s become trendy to name babies using kanji with readings that break from tradition. There’s an impression that this trend may be going too far, that new baby names can be written with kanji that are totally disconnected from their readings, and that all of these new-fangled names require tedious, in-depth explanations. I’ve even heard a joke that gets told in Japan about parents who have seemingly given their kid a normal name, but it turns out that the kanji are supposed to be read as “Pikachu.”

      • In this case, the character 小, which means “small” and would be expected to be read as “shou” or maybe even “ko,” receives the very weird reading of “mini,” as in “miniature.” I’m not sure if this would lead to the level of bullying we see in the first page of the manga, but it’s definitely something kids would give you some level of shit for.

      • Not sure how “Kokage” is written in kanji, but it definitely sounds like it means “small shadow.” In Japanese, “shadow” also often refers to someone’s influence over others. Someone who casts no shadow leaves no impression or impact.

  • Nanaka Uchiumi

    • Has actual survival instincts despite formally being suicidal

    • Jesus christ

Why it Failed

• This art is not good and it clearly is filters on photos

• Paneling is also not very interesting

• This pacing is wack

• I feel it has a message but it really doesn't feel like telling it

• Well this is blatantly abandoned

• I don’t like how they explain it, it was cooler as some mysterious panda thing

• Where were the other mascots?

• I don’t like how they got smarter or something, it’s weird seeing zombies driving a car

What it Did Well

• It’s just so insanely zany

• Shows off the MCs growth

• Pacing is super fast

• The art gets expressive in a really interesting way like the shoulder scene

• Cool touches of color

• I like the growth of Minta

Where it Could Have Gone

• More about the two characters surviving they get a main group way too fast

• I mean like end the series? Been cool to see them as a guerrilla army fighting the monsters

• MC save himself for Nanaka

Misc Thoughts

•  Did you notice in chapter 1 the attacking mascots didn’t get any approval stickers

• What was the deal with the star dude? How did he have so much energy

• Maxy Bee thoughts:

  • Volume 1, the only volume that was ever released, only contains 6 chapters and a short bonus comic. The whole series, if we can call it whole, has never been fully collected, but can be read over on the Jump Rookie service, a website and app where budding creators can upload their stuff in the hope of courting Shueisha/Jump’s attention.

    • What’s interesting is that there appears to be an ELEVENTH chapter on the service, but it’s literally just the bonus comic from the end of volume 1. False hope for mascot sickos, I guess. 

  • PANDAMIC is not to be mistaken for PANDAMIC, the Japanese idol group formerly known as Panda Miku, founded in 2016, who changed their name in 2019 to PANDAMIC after sufficient member rotation. Completely unrelated. 

  • In the time since PANDAMIC, Temote pivoted into NFTs like a fucking scrub, and is mostly doing nothing much in particular on twitter (currently known as X).

    • Despite bandwagoning onto NFTs, Temote has a note on their profile declaring that AI harvesting of their work is forbidden, so I guess they have their limits on what obvious scams are acceptable.

Final Verdict

• Six Word summary

  • Community

    • Tucker: Oh shit, pandas got the author | Funky survival tale mysteriously cut short 

    • Maxybee: the true mascot for failed manga

    • ☠ TheGreyPotter ☠: Loser loses heroically in panda apocalypse | Panda panda panda panda mushroom mushroom

    • Chickenwarlord: Girls dig strong jaws, escape routes

    • CT3LA: Well that was weird and bloody

    • Diego: Remember, never say no to panda.

    • duderocks: always knew mascot heads were evil | A Better mascot horror then bendy

    • Everyone's Favorite Uber-Talente: Panda panda panda panda. I got-

    • FunkyGreenOvertime: Did this manga cause panda-monium? BEAR-ly

    • JerseyLuck: Big PANDA doesn’t want the cure

    • Kpt.Kluless: People painstakingly persevere parasitic panda populace

    • LordAnubis: SKA-DOOSH!

    • Luffy-tarou: My eyes couldn’t BEAR this art

    • Portal man: Panda is love, panda is life

    • Riel: World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria

    • Sbubby: Bloody blackish bears bear bad becomings

  • David: Pan-dammit, just when it’s getting interesting

  • Jordan: I should clench my jaw more