is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by

Est Em is the pen name of Maki Satoh, a Japanese manga artist. Career She made her debut as a professional manga artist with three yaoi collections after being scouted in art school. She was a student of Rachel Thorn, who provided translations for ...

. It was serialized in

Shogakukan is a Japanese publisher of dictionaries, literature, comics ( manga), non-fiction, DVDs, and other media in Japan. Shogakukan founded Shueisha, which also founded Hakusensha. These are three separate companies, but are together called the H ...

's ''seinen'' manga magazine ''

Monthly Ikki was a monthly ''seinen'' manga magazine published by Shogakukan. It tended to specialize in underground or alternative manga, but it had its share of major hits as well. The magazine started in 2000 as a spin-off of Shogakukan's ''Weekly Big ...

'' from June 2011 to September 2014, when the magazine ceased its publication, and the series finished with its fifth volume in December of the same year.

Plot

Set in Spain, the story follows a girl known as , who after being betrayed by her same-sex lover, , decides to commit suicide. Hopeless, wandering down the road in the rain at night, Chica is about to be run over by a car driven by a man named . Antonio decides to help and takes her to his home; the next morning, Chica, mad at him because he did not kill her and wondering if Maria left her for being a woman, asks him if things would have been different if she were a man. Antonio, who used to be a bullfighting ''apoderado'' (a bullfighting manager), says that he would suggest Chica to become a ''matador'' if she were a man. Chica, makes up her mind and decides to become a bullfighter and die by the horns of a

bull A bull is an intact (i.e., not castrated) adult male of the species ''Bos taurus'' (cattle). More muscular and aggressive than the females of the same species (i.e., cows), bulls have long been an important symbol in many religions, includin ...

. Antonio, hesitant at first, takes her to the Plaza de toros de la Real Maestranza,

Seville Seville (; es, Sevilla, ) is the capital and largest city of the Spanish autonomous community of Andalusia and the province of Seville. It is situated on the lower reaches of the River Guadalquivir, in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula ...

, to show her the risks of being a bullfighter. There, Chica sees a ''corrida de toros'', where a bull is killed; Chica, however, without feeling discouraged about what she saw, driven by her desire to die and by the intention to prove that a woman can become a ''matador'', decides to start her training as a bullfighter under Antonio's instructions.

Publication

Written and illustrated by

, ''Golondrina'' was serialized in

's ''seinen'' manga magazine ''

'' from June 25, 2011, to September 25, 2014, when the magazine ceased its publication and it was announced that series would continue publication via collected ''

tankōbon is the Japanese term for a book that is not part of an anthology or corpus. In modern Japanese, the term is most often used in reference to individual volumes of a manga series: most series first appear as individual chapters in a weekly or ...

'' volumes. Shogakukan released the first volume on February 29, 2012. It was firstly announced that the series would end with six volumes; however, the fifth and last volume was released on December 26, 2014.

Volumes

References

External links

* * {{Monthly Ikki Bullfighting books Comics set in Spain Drama anime and manga LGBT in anime and manga Seinen manga Shogakukan manga

Plot

Publication

Volumes

References

Further reading

External links