Besties Yang Kuaikuai and Li Yu are nearing the end of their time in middle school and must face a familiar decision: stick around their small Chinese mountain town or set their sights to the big city. On a lark, they join their school's Comet Club, a ragtag band of nerds obsessed with what lies beyond the reaches of the stars. When one day the group spies strange glowing lights in the mountains and hikes out to investigate, what they find will forever change their lives.

Comet Club has a story and art by Yi Yang. English translation is done by Jamie Richards. Published by Takumigraphics (September 29, 2026). Rated T.

Rebecca Silverman
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This is the second Chinese coming-of-age manhua I've read, and based on that small sample size, I'm inclined to say that they've got the market cornered. Comet Club is bittersweet and poignant, a story about a group of young teens both trying to search out the last bit of magic in their world and about the adults who, either actively or passively, thwart them. It's gritty in both art and narrative, but it has to be. There's no guarantee that these kids will be all right.

The main protagonists are Yang Kuai Kuai and his best friend Li Yu. The boys live in a rural mountain town with a rapidly decreasing population, trying to find their way forward. Li Yu's father is an alcoholic and is shown exactly once, passed out in their squalid apartment. Yang Kuai Kuai's dad is kind and laidback, and his mother has just returned after a ten-year absence, determined to take her son back to the city with her despite not having been at all present in his life since he was four. Both boys put on a good enough show of being okay with their lives, but neither truly is. For Li Yu, his unhappiness takes the form of an obsession with UFOs, which he's certain he saw in the mountains. He convinces Yang Kuai Kuai to join the Comet Club at school, a group led by Kuai Kuai's chief academic rival, Qi Ming, invested in finding the UFOs Qi Ming, too, has seen on snowy nights in the mountains.

The UFOs are important not in that they exist, but in that they could exist. The kids in the club are all desperate for something bigger than themselves, something fantastical that they can believe in. Yang Kuai Kuai, whose dream (his mother's return) has already come true and soured, isn't invested in the club because he knows that things don't always work out. But the others desperately need this, especially Qi Ming, whose father has been absent for most of his life “working in Japan,” and Li Yu, with his unsatisfactory parent.

Yang Kuai Kuai is, of course, right to worry. This isn't a happy story, although it's one that ends well enough. Truths are hard and horrible, and this comes with warnings for gun violence and animal death. But it's how the kids handle what they discover and what they learn about themselves that's truly important. That's done well, particularly for Li Yu and Yang Kuai Kuai, and the touch of spiritualism that tints the denouement is one of the best moments in the story. The adults should want to help their children, and most of them do – they just make bad decisions in the name of doing it. That may be the most difficult discovery of them all.

Comet Club will likely appeal to fans of Taiyo Matsumoto. The art is reminiscent of his (although nothing I would call a copy), and the story shares themes with his series Sunny. It's not a kind or easy story, but I do think that it's one worth reading.

Erica Friedman
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School is never really easy, and middle school can be the most challenging. As we begin to approach adulthood, we're called upon to be “more adult,” often without role models who show us how that is supposed to work.

A comet is coming, but will that affect Yang Kuaikuai's life in any meaningful way? Well, yes, but not in the way he or any of his friends can predict. The Comet Club forms, and together they go searching for a comet, despite their own doubts, but they find something far less cosmic as they run into poachers.

The children here are flailing between their childhood dreams and unsure if forming new ones are worth it, especially considering how useless so many of the adults around them are.

The story of Comet Club is a solid coming-of-age story. I found the art hard to like, however. Snot, spit, off-body imaging, and a color palette that I found hard to really see. Yang's realism also includes quite a bit of snot. It is indubitably artistic, but not very aesthetically appealing for me. I can see that this is a “good” book, and very worth reading, but I don't feel as if I am left with anything significant after reading it. I may just be worn out on coming-of-age stories.

I did like the final chapters, as the Comet Club runs into the poachers, and mythology becomes reality. It didn't feel all that connected to the rest of the story, but it was a solid platform for the epilogue, as the Comet Club members find the emotional energy to pursue their dreams.