Title: Li’l Miss Vampire Can’t Suck Right Vol. 1
Author: Kyosuke Nishiki
Publisher: Yen Press
Language: English
Format: Paperback
Pages: 164
Genre: Slice-of-Life, Romance
Publication Date: July 22, 2025
The Story
Ishikawa is a vampire who can’t suck right, but I’m guessing you knew that from the title of the series, huh? Well, we open with her sharing classroom cleaning duties with a loner background character named Ootori. Everyone at school already knows that she is a vampire, but when Ootori discovers that she has been subsisting on snacks to try and fill her hunger void, he offers himself up as a test dummy so that Ishikawa can learn how to suck blood. Thus begins their friendship.
From here, the manga repeats this premise with each and every chapter until we are introduced to a new character named Eiko, who catches the two of them in the act of sucking training. Now, Eiko becomes another test dummy for her to practice on.
Sooner or later, the class discovers that Ootori and Ishikawa are friends, and now he becomes the center of attention, which causes him to run away. Ishikawa chases after him, and she discovers that there is a way to pay him back for helping her train… and that is to help him overcome his shyness and become a bit more extroverted.
Then, our manga breaks down into some episodic chapters, such as watching Ishikawa excel at sports and spending a day together with Ootori, where they go out to eat.
Characters
Ishikawa is quite a one-dimensional character. She’s a clumsy vampire who can’t suck blood correctly, so she fills the void by eating a bunch of snacks. She attempts to adopt a dual personality by reading a vampire manga and modeling her public image after the main character, but that doesn’t last long at all. She does try to switch back and forth between the two personas, but I never found a significant difference between the two. Her other trait is that she turns into a chibi whenever she tries to suck blood. As a main character, she doesn’t do anything revolutionary that you have seen in other slice-of-life comedy series. Her only gimmick is that of a vampire… one that the entire school is aware of, yet doesn’t seem to question why a vampire exists in real life. Take away the vampire and blood-sucking gimmick, and she’s just a clumsy high school girl you can find in just about any other gag manga.
Ootori is just the polite loner boy you’ve also seen a hundred times over. Being polite earned him the role of being Ishikawa’s test dummy, but at least he offered himself up and wasn’t forced into the situation like some other main characters would. Although there was a setup for that situation to happen when they showed Ootori wondering how he got himself into this mess, making it seem like he was forced into it, but when you find out that he willingly did it via his own self-conscious choice, it makes the opening pages seem nonsensical and a moot point. They try to build some sympathy for him by having him talk about being a loner and finding it difficult to talk to other people, but by the time I got to this point, I had little reason to care.
Final Thoughts
Needless to say, I did not enjoy this first volume. The premise is extremely shallow and poorly executed. This is one of those series that explains exactly what you’re getting into just by reading the title. Ishikawa is a vampire who can’t suck right. Copy and paste that premise over and over again with each chapter while masking it with a slightly different situation, and you have exactly what this first volume is all about. Granted, the last few chapters try to break the mold by doing things differently, but I got so burned out with reading the same premise over and over again that by the time we got there, I was ready to just close the cover on it and put this into the “regret buying” bin.
Gag mangas are hit or miss these days, and it seems as if this one was heavily relying on its gimmick more than its characters. In order to make a gag manga work well, you need very solid characters and an interesting story plot to accompany the gags. There was very little to no story here. The story is the title of this manga. The characters are flat and just repeats of tropes that we’ve seen many times over by now, with nothing that distinguishes them from any other similar character from any other series. The only exception is Ishikawa’s gimmick of being a vampire, and judging from how this is presented, it’s clear that this series is banking on that gimmick alone to get the job done.
Sadly, it doesn’t. There are many better gag manga out there with more interesting characters and a much better premise. If you want a gag manga with characters you can feel yourself attached to based on eating… go read Working! Yes, it’s not about vampires, and not about blood, but you’ll have a much better experience.
I feel the only people who will enjoy this series will either be people new to manga who haven’t experienced this kind of stuff many times before, or people who just like one-dimensional gimmicks. I don’t, so this one is getting dropped.
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This item was purchased for review.
