He's back!

Last weekend, I stopped by the local Kinokuniya book store and noticed the new GTO manga by Fujisawa Tooru: GTO Shonan 14 Days. I remember hearing about its existence last year, but this was the first time I’d seen it in collected form. I snatched it up immediately, because I was a huge fan of the first Great Teacher Onizuka manga a decade ago.

Great Teacher Onizuka holds a special place in my heart for many reasons. It was the first book I ever read in Japanese, it was the first Japanese drama I ever watched, and it broke the mold for every other school drama in existence. The stories lost some steam after 14 volumes, but Onizuka’s force of personality kept the whole thing together with his wonderful mix of crude humor, slapstick, and shockingly empathic moments hidden under the rough exterior.

In the years since GTO ended, Fujisawa Tooru hasn’t quite been able to recapture that magic. Does a return to his signature character mean that he’s trying to cash in on previous successes, or is it actually worth reading? Thoughts after the jump.

One of the problems with the original GTO was its constant need to outdo itself. After the manga dealt with pedestrian school problems like bullying, suicidal students, and inattentive parents, the plots kept escalating (underground arm wrestling contest) and escalating (brain hemorrhage) until we saw Onizuka stretch our suspension of disbelief to the breaking point by coming back from the dead and jumping a motorcycle into a burning building (yes, that’s really how it ended). GTO Shonan 14 Days starts with a new cast around our beloved 22-year-old Eikichi Onizuka, and by giving him a new crew to work with, reminds us of everything we like about the Great Teacher Onizuka.

The new manga picks up almost immediately after the end of the original Great Teacher Onizuka, and after a few obligatory references to the events of its predecessor, gives Onizuka a familiar-yet-new setting to work with. While on the run from angry parents and more than a few police, Onizuka ends up in his hometown of Shonan, helping out at a shelter for problematic young teens. The kids are an eclectic mix of abandoned, abused, and antisocial children with one thing in common: none of them trust adults.

Both Fujisawa Tooru and his greatest creation are in their element in this new story, bringing back everything that was good about GTO. The comedy runs thick and dirty in the pages, as Onizuka uses every dirty trick he can to survive the kids at White Swan while trying to appease the demands of his own erection. Underneath that rough exterior (and a few more layers of rough interior) lies the same warm heart as always, though. That warmth shines through in his fierce refusal to repeat society’s mistakes with these damaged children. Just as before, there are a lot of “hell yeah!” moments sprinkled in the manga, where you cheer for Onizuka as he gives society a well-deserved middle finger. In the first couple of volumes alone, he punches an abusive father through a window, punches the chief of police in the face for valuing his job over his daughter, and gets the local biker gangs to cooperate with the police in a citywide search for a kidnapped girl. It’s just great scene after great scene in the manga so far, and I’m just as hooked now as I was ten years ago.

From the first three boks, it looks like Shonan 14 Days will be a great showcase for the enduring appeal of Onizuka. He’s the epitome of an overgrown man-child, but thanks to that very flaw, he connects with these kids in a way no one else could. He’s stubborn and slow on the uptake, yet admirable in his determination to make sure no kid gets neglected. He’s an irredeemable punk, but he’s also a cartoon superhero, sustaining beating after beating but always getting up so we know it’s okay to laugh, in the tradition of Buster Keaton and Jackie Chan. He’s a lecher, but… well, okay, he’s just a lecher and it’s funny, there’s nothing really redeeming about that part of him.

The best part of Shonan 14 Days, though, is that it gives itself a time limit. After two weeks of Onizuka’s over-the-top exploits, it’ll be done before it can strain our ability to believe that a dirty-minded teacher with a checkered past can be a hero. I really hope that someone picks up this manga and releases it soon, because this manga so far is just like its name: great.

Full review after the jump – spoilers ahead! (Review spoiler: I really, really like Cross Game and you should read it)

Adachi Mitsuru is the undisputed master of the high school baseball manga. In the ’80s, his Touch manga captivated millions with the story of Uesugi Tatsuya, a young man who has to live in the shadow of his dead brother Kazuya and fulfill his promise to bring their childhood friend Minami to Koushien, the Japanese sports equivalent of March Madness. In the ’90s, H2 had a strong and successful run, though the bromance between Hideo and Hiro didn’t capture the Japanese imagination quite the same way Tatsuya and Minami did. As Adachi’s third major baseball manga (I don’t count the short Idol Ace), Cross Game had a lot to live up to, and in many ways it surpassed its predecessors.

Just like in Touch, Adachi is unafraid to bring tragedy into his tales of youth. The brief prologue starts with main character Kitamura Kou and his grade school sweetheart Tsukishima Wakaba seemingly on the fast track to growing old together, but after Wakaba drowns in a swimming accident at the too-young age of 11, her death casts a long shadow over the lives of both Kou and her younger sister Aoba.

The strength of most Adachi works is their quiet ability to convey emotion without having to resort to excessive amounts of dialogue. This is at its best in the few pages that come after Wakaba’s funeral: Adachi depicts a confused, lost Kou looking around to see what reaction is most appropriate. Finally, hours later, he sees another boy crying, realizes that it’s okay to cry, and weeps silently and brokenly into the night. It’s a powerful sequence, and it doesn’t require more than three words to convey the whole emotional range of grief. There are dozens of scenes like this in Cross Game (Wakaba’s sixteenth birthday made me especially dusty), and they give the characters a lot more life and depth than you’d expect from your average baseball story (think Field of Dreams as opposed to Major League).

It’s not all sad and serious, though – not by a long shot. Adachi breaks the fourth wall regularly, and always uses that time to poke fun at himself, and he never lets you forget that all of the characters are teenagers. They have their serious moments, but by and large they horse around, make fun of each other, and enjoy their youth. The cast is made up almost entirely of likeable characters, whose personalities are largely well-developed aside from the shortstop Senda, who never really graduates from being simple comic relief.

Storywise, the manga does a very good job of balancing all aspects of its nature. When it’s a baseball story, it’s a white-knuckle play-by-play that keeps you in suspense at what is going to happen next, filling the natural gaps of a baseball game with gripping dialogue and little character pieces. When it’s a comedy, it flows naturally and never feels forced – I especially love the segment where Aoba’s older sister her boyfriend that she’ll only marry him if the team goes to Koushien, which causes the laid back man to turn into a screaming firebrand of a baseball coach. And the romantic element, an underplayed but steady presence in the story, is a gentle stream that never becomes a rushing torrent; even so, it’s incredibly satisfying when the story reaches its inevitable and heartwarming conclusion. The ending, which happened earlier this year, reminds you that deep down, this is a youth drama that happens to star baseball players, rather than a full-fledged baseball series.

In conclusion: READ CROSS GAME. When the first volume comes out in October, I will remind you guys again, because it is something that everyone should read. It is doubly urgent for me to support this release because of the failure of Big Windup in the states, which sold so abysmally that FUNimation dropped it like a ton of bricks. If this does well, maybe the window will open for some of Adachi’s older works to see release – though that’s unlikely, I can at least cling to the hope if this does well enough!

It’s an interesting little modern fantasy manga, but I don’t know how much of my interest comes from the fact that Nightow is behind it and how much of it comes out of the actual quality of the art and story. After all, Nightow himself said that the manga exists because he wanted to make “a manga where people shout out the names of their attacks,” and there’ no more generic manga type than the fighting fantasy.

More after the jump!

The main character of Kekkai Sensen is nominally Leonardo Watch (all names are roughly translated, he could officially be Leonard Wach for all I know), a young man who picks up odd jobs and is accidentally sucked into the vigilante organization known as Libra. But the real main character so far is the city he lives in, Herusalem’s Lot. The city used to be New York City, but three years before the manga’s opening, a gate from a demonic world only known as “Beyond” opens, flooding New York with refugees, criminals, and monsters. After years of chaos and bloodshed, the former residents of NYC live as best as they can in the nominally settled zone. Their lives are full of violence and crime and destruction, but they manage to scrape out livings alongside the new class of demons and magical monsters next door.

The first volume is a pretty exciting introduction to this world, as you find out just how bad regular people have it in Herusalem’s Lot. In the course  of just one day, Leonardo finds himself in the middle of a bank robbery, is attacked by the HLPD’s powered suits division after he falls in with Libra, and chases a monkey into Central Park after the villainous Femt, King of Depravity, summons a demonic terror and hides half of the summoning gate on the frightened creature. It’s a whirlwind tour of the worst parts of town, and between Nightow’s penchant for wildly deformed monster designs and his love of drawing gore, it’s grotesque and fascinating all at the same time.

Only one volume has been released so far, but there’s plenty of promise in Kekkai Sensen – the characters are interesting and interact well with each other, and the setting and back stories are fascinating. Add in Nightow’s unique touch for grisly action spreads and while KEkkai Sensen isn’t for everyone, I’m interested enough to add this to my must-follow list. Here’s hoping that Nightow doesn’t take too many of his infamous hiatuses from this one, because I’d like to see it develop.

The French cover sure is... purple.

I’ve been reading Moriyama Daisuke’s World Embryo for years, and I was excited back in 2008 when Dark Horse announced its release plans for the Chrono Crusade creator’s current work. Sadly, the book has yet to materialize in America – current listings have it pegged for an August 2010 release, which is a very long time to wait for fans of Moriyama’s work, especially since World Embryo in many ways surpasses Chrono Crusade.

On the surface, World Embryo is another “Teenagers with superpowers” story, but a combination of Moriyama Daisuke’s amazing art and the dark mood of the story separate it from the pack. The main character is a lying, conniving boy with his own secret agenda and a grim resolve to see the world burn if it gets in his way, and the villains are ruthless body thieves who casually murder civilians and warp their bodies into horrific creatures. It’s chock full of mystery, conspiracy, murder, and tragedy, a more refined form of what made Chrono Crusade so exciting beyond the mere nuns with guns cheesecake.

It starts when Amami Riku, a mousy young student with a penchant for lying, receives a sudden e-mail from his beloved friend Amane, who was presumed dead in a fire two years before. The message leads him to an abandoned hospital with ties to his past, and he bumps into another old friend, Takebe Youhei. As he searches for signs of Amane, he stumbles right into a secret war being waged between a fiendish horde of body-stealing demons called Kanshu and a loose collection of individuals, including Youhei, who fight the Kanshu with special weapons known as Jinki. His world only becomes more complicated when he trips over a large egg that hatches into Neene, a girl who suspiciously looks exactly like a young Amane.

Riku quickly finds himself at the center of a whirlwind due to his knowledge of the secret Kanshu war and Neene’s enigmatic connection to the queen of the Kanshu. People from all sides constantly bombard him with shady offers and , and his world only gets more complicated when he becomes the latest victim of the Kanshu and is forced to take Youhei’s Jinki to save himself, killing Youhei in the process. Caught between the two worlds, the only thing he knows for sure is that Neene is the key to everything,and he resolves to deceive both sides of the conflict for as long as he can until he can find best outcome for him and his remaining friends, since his double life tends to leak out and hurt those around him.

The story is full of emotionally heart-wrenching moments, but I’d be lying if I said that the story was the main draw of this manga – with a monthly publication schedule for each chapter, it’s taken an awfully long time to develop the characters and give the story some momentum. On the plus side, Moriyama Daisuke’s art absolutely shines because of the extra time he’s allowed. The man can and often does put together unbelievably gorgeous two-page action spreads that remind you just how wonderful black and white can be. His art style has evolved from Chrono Crusade‘s Roaring Twenties fantasy to match the dirty, darker tone of this modern tale, with starker angles and greatly improved use of white space. His paneling and layout could stand to improve a little bit, and he could definitely take some lessons in how to draw girls who aren’t as busty as American superheroes, but overall I’m still a huge fan.

The manga’s already coming out in French and has a few other translations available world-wide, but for those Americans out there, you’ll have to wait until August to see this from Dark Horse – unless they delay it again, since it was first supposed to come out in Summer 2009. I promise you, though, it will be worth the wait.

The stars of Love Attack! are Yusa Chiemi and Hirata Akifumi, who get together in the most unlikely of ways. Chiemi is told by the faculty that she’s gotten into so many fights that she’s on the verge of being expelled from school, regardless of how justified those fights were – she tends to punch first and ask questions later when she sees people being bullied or preyed on. She’s given one last chance to wipe her permanent record clean: she has to reform Akifumi, the infamous “Deranged Devil” of her class.

Because she only really knows one way to resolve conflicts, Chiemi tries to solve all of her problems by kicking Akifumi in the face and shouting at him to stop his evil ways, and surprisingly, it works! It turns out that Aki fell in love with her at first sight, and in spite of her face-kicking, he asks her out the next time he comes to class! After some waffling and a whole lot of confusion, the two of them start dating, and the manga starts.

What makes the manga so interesting is that Chiemi and Aki are fundamentally decent people who can’t help being abrasive sometimes. Their volatile relationship hits a lot of rough patches (as I recall, they’ve broken up at least once, and there’ve been a whole lot of punches thrown, though not usually at each other), but the two of them try their damnedest to learn how to make a relationship work.

What really endears them to me is how they honestly seem to learn from their mistakes, and want to overcome all of the obstacles instead of sitting around moaning about how much they suck. Chiemi is headstrong, and sometimes she’s outright dumb, but she knows it and works her ass off to overcome her own flaws, while Aki complements her well with his combination of stubbornness and understanding. A great example of this is when, during the arc featuring cynical womanizer Tachibana Yuuya, the two lead characters break up due to Yuuya’s machinations taking advantage of Chiemi’s naivete. Chiemi spends a few chapters crying her eyes out, but soon she replaces her angst with resolve to make sure she never gets taken advantage of like that ever again.

The supporting cast mirrors the main characters as well – their little stories are tales of learning to look past outward appearances, or learning how to trust people, and all sorts of other little life lessons that make this a very satisfying high school drama to read. These kids may be idiots, but they’re honest and eager and they don’t stay down for long, unlike other shoujo characters who wallow in their angst for years at a time.

Love Attack! is being released in English by TokyoPop, and I recommend at least taking a look at it to see if you like the cast as much as I do. It’s rocky romance done the right way, with plenty of warmth and humor to balance out the tears and anger.

Image from Risarule on pixiv.

Rosario + Vampire is a strange beast – it’s a manga I got into because the anime was so dumb, I had to see what redeeming qualities the manga had. Because, let’s be frank about this, the anime has pretty much nothing going for it, except the opening and ending themes are sung by Mizuki Nana. People kept telling me that the manga was better whenever I watched an execrable episode of the anime, and they were right – it’s definitely an improvement over the plotless blob of merchandising that called itself an anime, though I still have some reservations about it.

Let’s get this out of the way from the outset: the main draw of Rosario + Vampire is the art, especially of the girls wearing costumes or kicking high. RosaVam has no illusions about being great literature, or even mildly above average – it’s a fan service vehicle that has fun characters and an interesting rogue’s gallery of monsters and villains thanks to its “monster school” setting. With that said, it’s still very enjoyable on a basic level. The art is nice to look at (especially with the second series, as Ikeda Akihisa’s art has improved by leaps and bounds since he started), and as much as I complain about shows built around their fan service, I have to admit that the RosaVam manga does its eye candy very, very well.

But if it was just eye candy, I would have lost interest and stopped reading it long ago (see: Ichigo 100%). What interests me about RosaVam is its characters. Strip away the short skirts, the various bondage references, and the rest of the barrage of fan service, and you have a (much shorter) manga about a bunch of outcasts fighting to stick together for as long as they can.

You also have a much more interesting version of main character Aono Tsukune. In the anime, he’s a wishy-washy dweeb with no real personality, who attracts girls to himself with mild kindness. In the manga, he’s a pacifist who has to fight with his inner demons constantly, or else he’ll go berserk and have to be put down like a mad dog, and later, he has to turn that into the strength to protect himself and the little bit of peace he’s found. That’s what separates the manga from the anime: the anime exists to sell CD singles, boob mouse pads, and all sorts of other character-based merchandise, while the manga has a story with real drama, real conflict, and occasional “wow!” moments.

For example, the most recent volume of the manga introduces Otonashi San, a quiet and reserved girl who happens to be an alumni of the main characters’ school. She’s a siren, an ancient creature of the sea, but all she really wants in life is a warm, inviting place to call home. The other monsters in the area have other ideas, and want to turn her into a weapon for their plan of eliminating humans from the world. The main characters, Tsukune and his harem of monsters, not only have to protect her from a veritable army of beasts and monsters, but they have to help her gain acceptance from her human friend, whose husband was eaten by a monster very similar to San. It’s almost heartbreaking when San reveals her true nature to the woman who’s at once her boss, her best friend, and her surrogate mother, with every expectation that the woman will run away screaming. Moments like that are why I keep reading the book.

Of course, on the other side of the ledger, there are scenes like the one where Rubi ties herself up into a bondage fetish position because she “got bored.” And the loli references, and the constant boob-smashing, and the… well, let’s just say there’s a lot on the other side of the ledger. So you have to take the good with the bad with a manga like RosaVam – but at least with the manga, the good parts are good enough to keep you going.

The core members of Princess Resurrection‘s often-rotating cast are Hiyorimi Hiro, an ordinary boy who is strangely both expendable and immortal, and Hime, a princess of monsters who never loses her cool. Every chapter is basically a miniature horror movie: the two of them, plus any of their friends who happen to be around, are attacked by a host of supernatural menaces who have been sent by Hime’s rivals for the throne. They face a who’s who of classic movie monsters, representing every genre and every era of horror: there are pod people and zombies, ghost ships and vampires, masked murderers, and even a fly in a lab coat.

Almost all of the stories are self-contained, and most follow this formula:

1) Strange events start to occur around Hime and Hiro.
2) Hiro and a few others get caught in the monster of the week’s attack (Hiro gets back up later thanks to Hime’s magical bond with him, but any humans who are nearby aren’t so lucky).
3) Everyone has a tough time holding off the attack, except for Hime, who watches calmly and analyzes what has to be done.
4) Full-page or two-page spread of Hime brandishing a makeshift weapon, ready to take care of business.
5) Everyone comes out okay (except the ones who are dead), while Hime explains how she figured everything out.

The formula gets a bit tiresome around volume 6 or 7 even with the many variations on the formula offered by Mitsunaga, but it’s quite enjoyable for what it is. The presentation is excellent – Mitsunaga’s simple, clean art, plus his artistic, old-school sense of black and white, make each chapter a love song to the Nosferatu era of horror. The manga is great at imbuing the shadows and backgrounds with personality and life, and even in the “boring” parts of the manga, there is a lot to appreciate in the layout and use of darkness. Heck, the black and white pages even make the buckets of blood seem more artistic than excessive.

What makes Princess Resurrection repetitive after a while is Hiro’s ability to stand up after taking damage that would kill anyone else. While there is some minor, artificial danger when Hiro is separated from Hime and she’s unable to resurrect him, you always know that he’s going to be just fine in the end. Sure, there are casualties, but often you don’t get to know the character very well at all before they get offed in some kind of noble fashion, making them the equivalent of Star Trek redshirts.

Still, if you have an interest in horror or supernatural action, Princess Resurrection is worth a read. If you don’t like the formula, you can always put it down, and if you can appreciate it for what it is, you’ll enjoy every panel of it.

This week’s Manga Monday is from an artist very near and dear to my heart: Inui Sekihiko, who made his professional debut drawing the excellent Comic Party manga. His latest work, Ratman, is both a love song to and a critique of the superhero genre, be it the Japanese tokusatsu hero or the American comic book superhero. It’s one of my current favorite manga, combining great art with a story and theme I can relate to from both an American and Japanese standpoint.

Ratman is the story of Katsuragi Shuuto, a hot-blooded high school student with dreams of becoming a superhero. In most other stories, that would just be a pipe dream; in the world of Ratman, it’s possible, but is only available to the priviliged few. The superhero creation process is prohibitively expensive, so in most cases, superheroes have corporate sponsors and are treated like celebrities. Shuuto is short and not very photogenic, so his aspirations don’t seem very likely in a world where marketing is just as important as superpowers.

Shuuto’s passion and sense of justice don’t bring him any endorsement deals, but they do attract the attention of his classmate Mirea, who is a member of a villainous group known as Jackal. She and her sister trick him into becoming their first guinea pig, a “dark hero” known as Ratman. The Jackal group, which harbors an enigmatic grudge against the superhero community at large, forces Shuuto headfirst into the world of superheroes, where he finds out that being a hero isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The more heroes he meets and clashes with, the more he becomes disillusioned by the cynical and mercenary world of professional heroism and the more he wishes to mimic the heroes of his youth: idealistic, virtuous, and proud.

So far, the story has been very personal to Shuuto and hasn’t strayed very far from him, tempting as it might be to go on a tangent and give the absolutely fascinating supporting cast some more face time. We’ve followed every step of his growth: from powerless and indignant weakling, to confused newbie in the superhero world, to disillusioned and angry teenager, to his current status of talented and determined hero-in-training. It’s been a great ride so far, with plenty of comedy, melodramatic identity crises, and romance – all integral parts of the basic superhero tableau, and all given their due in the pages of the book.

One of my favorite elements of Ratman is how Inui manages to critique the worst parts of the modern superhero while never giving in to pure cynicism and remaining loyal to the core ideals of the genre. Seeing the world from the eyes of an unwilling “villain” lets you see both the good and the bad in the world as heroes of all walks of life come gunning for Ratman, and Inui makes sure that there are no one-dimensional characters. Shuuto’s experience in the world is very balanced – when he sees the underappreciated supporting cast of a supergroup turning on their glory-hogging leader, he also sees the fundamental heroic urge that led them to becoming a team in the first place. He meets the rich and the poor, the dangerously reckless and the kind-hearted, and he learns a little about himself from all of them.

In a particularly memorable sequence of scenes, Ratman meets his idol Ankaiser, one of the most popular heroes in the business. After a brief comic interlude where the starstruck Shuuto asks for Ankaiser’s autograph, he gets his face beaten in by the media golden boy, who laughs and calls heroism “just a job.” When next they meet, Ankaiser has started a fire at a hotel, simply to make his imminent victory over Ratman more dramatic. Shuuto, enraged at Ankaiser’s willing endangerment of hundreds of people for personal gain, proceeds to thrash Ankaiser so badly that he spends the next few weeks unconscious. But the story doesn’t end there: Shuuto later meets Ankaiser in his civilian identity, where he trains prospective boxers and provides them with hope for the future. The way Inui gives every character an extra dimension makes Ratman a lot of legs on re-readings, as you see the characters in a new light the second time around.

Oh yeah, and the art's really good too.

Not every character is developed so deeply, of course, but the amount of life Inui breathes into his cast is amazing. Even Jackal’s ubiquitous henchmen, the Jackies, manage to ooze personality without ever saying a word or removing their skull masks – they’re a testament to Inui’s ability to portray physical comedy with dynamic layouts and paneling, and they’re absolutely hilarious.

The Ratman manga has been licensed by TokyoPop, and when it comes out next year I’ll be sure to let you know. The manga is very accessible to Western audiences due to its American comic book sensibilities, and I’ve been looking forward to its American debut since I first talked to Inui about it at Fanime 2007.

Tetsuwan Birdy, AKA Birdy the Mighty, was inexplicably made into an OAV in the ’90s, 10 years after Yuuki abandoned it and 10 years before he brought it back. The current run of the manga started again in 2003, and since I had fond memories of the ’90s anime, I started picking it up to read.

The story starts out pretty fun – it’s an amalgam of the space police “procedural”, the gender-bending identity story, and the school drama. It all starts when young Senkawa Tsutomu stumbles into a fight between elite space cop Birdy Cephon Altera and a fugitive alien. He’s caught in the crossfire and killed, but using her advanced technology, Birdy manages to preserve his mind and transplant it into her own body, allowing him to live a semi-normal life while she attempts to rebuild his body. But since he’s borrowing her body, she occasionally needs to take it back over while tracking down alien criminals, leading to some interesting situations at school and at home.

The world of Tetsuwan Birdy is really well fleshed out, because as always, Yuuki is very good at filling in the details. Over the course of the series, you get to know all about how the science and the politics of Birdy’s world work. Yuuki keeps things it out with some great villains who keep the series exciting – though sometimes they’re just gross; the melting body-stealing guy induces a lot of winces from the squeamish, even as he adds a lot of depth and tension to the overall story.

Tetsuwan Birdy‘s biggest weakness is the same weakness of the Patlabor series, though – Yuuki Masami has an unnatural love of drawing people in darkened rooms talking a lot, and when he starts dipping into his tried and true material of government plots and dark conspiracies, the manga really bogs down in itself. Characters spend far too much time sitting around in chairs and talking about things that will eventually happen, while you get bored and start reading something else.

I’m trying to remember just when the series jumped the shark for me – I think it was around volume 7, but I’ll have to go home and check on my collection before I make a decision. Regardless, Tetsuwan Birdy is probably a manga you should skip in favor of the anime version, which I’m told does a much better job of getting to the good stuff.

The manga has massive crossover appeal, pulling in the usual female audience with its shirtless prettyboys and strong female lead, while attracting men in droves with the maid cafe setting. The incredible line art of Fujiwara Hiro doesn’t hurt its popularity, either. It’s one of the few shoujo series I’ve ever enjoyed this much, but there are a few factors that make me nervous about just how far it can go.

Maid-Sama! is the story of Ayuzawa Misaki, a man-hating teen who’s determined to turn her formerly all-boys school into a place where girls can study in peace without harassment from what she sees as the violent, slovenly male populace. She’s so popular that she’s been elected student body president, and she spends her days kicking the boys at school into shape and building her reputation for ferocity and sternness.

But, behind her tough facade, Misaki packs a secret – because her father abandoned her family and saddled them with his massive debt, Misaki has to work at a maid cafe after school in order to help make ends meet for her mother. When Usui Takumi, one of the most popular boys at school, finds her in her work uniform, her life turns upside-down as she struggles with the stress of keeping her work life and her school life from crashing together and destroying each other.

Maid-sama!‘s appeal comes from the massive gap between Misaki’s school persona – headstrong, fierce, and independent – with her maid act, which is subservient, cheerful, and cutesy (this gap is typical of the tsundere archetype, which I’ll talk about later if people need an explanation). Takumi falls in love with both sides of her almost instantly, but her misandry prevents her from being accepting him. Many of the chapters are a variation on this outline: Misaki is trying too hard to do something and refuses help, until Usui is forced to step in to make her realize that she can’t do everything alone. It’s a good foundation for a running romance, pitting two strong characters against each other as opposed to the wishy-washy doormats who are ubiquitous in Japanese romcoms.

What makes me nervous about the series is that it just might be too popular for its own good. Kaichou ha Maid-sama! has become a strong seller, and that means it will only end when its sales start to dip. The recent stories have been a bit stale and repetitive, but because it’s so popular, there’s a strong possibility that the story will get stretched out as long as humanly possible before the inevitable romantic conclusion. There’s only so long that you can delay a simple, non-triangular romance before it gets frustrating (see: Fushigi Yuugi, Ranma 1/2), and while Maid-sama! isn’t quite there  yet… it’s getting close.

Who knows – maybe the anime will refresh my interest in this manga, which really does have a great foundation and should make the anime transition with few problems. But as it is, I’m going to keep my good memories of it and stop reading before I become disillusioned with it.