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Pandemic: Research Notes
🕑 Added 2025-04-23 12:00:07 +0000 UTCTucker:
Title: Pandamikku パンダミック
You can just pronounce it like “pandemic” but with “dam” instead of the “dem”
Author
Temote Nozomi 手持望
Definitely seems like a pen name to me, though I’m not finding anything online about it after a (very cursory) search.
Family name is written as “held/possessed in the hand” or “handheld.” Personal name literally means “hope/desire”
Characters
Kokage Minita [?][?]小太
Ko-kah-gay, Mee-nee-tah
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.
Ishibashi
Ee-shee-bah-shee
Kousen-kun
Koh-sen-kɯn
The kanji on his head is “light”
Pandamon
Pahn-dah-moan\
Writing on chest says “nakayoshi,” meaning “buddy”
Nanaka Ichi’umi
Nah-nah-kah, Ee-chee-ɯ-mee
Tsugumi Noda
Tsɯ-gɯ-mee No-dah
Hacchan
Hah-chahn
Name comes from combining “hachi” (eight) with the -chan honorific
Kaede-chan
Kah-ay-day
Rina
Ree-nah
Kiichi Nirasawa
Kee-ee-chee Nee-rah-sah-wah
MaxyBee:
Manga Details
Nozomi Temote
Notable people they were an assistant for
None known
Notable people they had as assistants
None known
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
Manga Itself / Misc 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.
