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Contemporary Fantasy Manga 101: Oh My Goddess!
Glenn Hough (gallyangel) is a nonpracticing futurist, an anime and manga otaku, and is almost obsessive about finishing several of the lists tracked on WWEnd. In this series on Fantasy Manga Glenn will provide an overview of the medium and the place of fantasy within it.
The manga which has the record for longest continuously running manga in the USA is, (drum role please)…A romantic comedy!
Oh My Goddess! premiered in the USA in August of 1994 and 46 takubon later is still going. It’s been going on even longer than Blade of the Immortal. Blade has ended it’s run in Japan. The saga of Keiichi and Belldandy has not, so we will see a 20th year mark for USA publication next year.
We’ve all heard of star crossed lovers before, but this is ridiculous.
Dark Horse has this to say about the first Volume:
Alone in his dorm on a Saturday night, Nekomi Tech’s Keiichi Morisato dials a wrong number that will change his life forever – reaching the Goddess Technical Help Line. Granted one wish by the charming young goddess Belldandy – a wish for anything in the world – Keiichi wishes she would stay with him always! Complications are bound to ensue from this; the immediate first being the new couple getting tossed out of the dorm – it’s males only! As the hapless student and his mysterious “foreign beauty” ride around looking for a new place to stay – risking the different dangers of seeking shelter with an otaku convinced Belldandy is an imaginary woman, and a Zen priest convinced she’s a sinister witch – Keiichi’s still got his classes on Monday morning! How is his new “exchange student” companion going to be received on the N.I.T. campus? A little too well for normal life to ever return…
And thus Keiichi’s troubles begin. And that’s just with Belldandy in tow. Just wait until her sisters, Urd and Skuld, show up.
I’ve been reading manga for just over 20 years now. And when Oh My Goddess! was first published I’d never read an American comic like it. I’d come to manga from a traditional Marvel, D.C., Disney and Scrooge background, so a domestic comedy staring a dweeb college student, a wish, and a bunch of goddesses was like a revelation. The timing was perfect since I was college age myself. Sign me up. I could use a wish.
This really goes back to the point I made before about the wider range of manga they have in Japan. That’s the joke in Japan: If you have a niche genre or audience in mind, there is probably a manga published somewhere sometime, that’s just for you. And it’s practically the truth. But the thing is, Oh My Goddess! in Japan is very mainstream. There is nothing here that we haven’t seem before. So it’s the reformulated elements and the execution which makes it stand out in whatever market this manga comes to.
I’ve got to imagine that Keiichi and his Goddesses have been tremendous money makers for Dark Horse all these years, but we must admit that publishing a contemporary fantasy romantic comedy in 1994 was a gamble. When was the last American comic like that? Perhaps it was the Bewitched comic, based on the TV show, which was published by Dell in 1965. Or perhaps I Dream of Jeannie, published by Dell around the same time. Which is highly interesting since all kinds of comparisons have been made between those two shows and Oh My Goddess!.
I think this was an important moment. Dark Horse’s gamble wasn’t much of a gamble; they had a hit, which is still going strong. Oh My Goddess! proved that the American comic scene was ready for something different. It also proved that romance and comedy could be translated, language to language, culture to culture. We, the American audience, could get it. A few cultural prompts aside, we’d get it, we’d enjoy it.
This, I think leads us to why we need to pay attention. Oh My Goddess! is, and has been, so fundamental to the American manga experience for so long. And it’s so approachable; it’s such a gateway manga. It’s familiar from the start. In SF manga we value the fact that with some of the heavy hitters, we’re just thrown into the deep end. Sink or swim, those SF manga will take us all someplace new. Oh My Goddess! feels exactly the opposite. It could be unfolding right down the street. And since it’s fantasy, and they’re goddesses, we’d never know. Spells of forgetfulness are rather easy for a first class, type two, unlimited Goddess like Belldandy.
Oh My Goddess! starts as mundanely situational as one can get. Which is the real charm of the series since Kosuke Fuhishima is always trying to present normalcy filtered through the lens of having a bunch of goddesses living with Keiichi. Finding a new place to live, finding a place for Keiichi’s sister, bike racing, money troubles, troubles at school, the social implications of a dweeb like Keiichi having a beauty like Belldandy, big sister Urd moving in and trying to help Keiichi’s slow moving love affair with Belldandy. Everything Keiichi now does is touched by magic at some level. That was some wish.
As the series continues, and another goddess moves in, and other goddesses or demons make appearances, the manga does venture off into a more comedic action fantasy genre. But this should be expected. What else is going to happen when you put three goddesses, who should all be working in heaven, at the same spot on Earth for awhile? Strange things start to happen. Which Keiichi and company have to deal with, and deal with, and handle some more. It never stops, does it Keiichi? But like the red thread of fate, the romance between Keiichi and Belldandy endures, no matter the craziness around them.
I must admit that Oh My Goddess! is now tinged with nostalgia. I was doing such and such when I first stumbled over it. There’s a scene in the first volume where Keiichi threatens to crash an anime otaku’s LD player over his head for not being a gentleman around Belldandy. Remember LD players? Or S-VHS decks? Too funny. And yet this timeless romance is anchored in a specific time and place, which grows more distant with each passing day. I begin to wonder if this romance will be listed along side the great ones of world literature.
I suppose, all we can do is wish.
Finding Oh My Goddess! is no problem at all; it’s in print. It’s more complicated to figure out which edition you want. Dark Horse ran the comic version for years. Then they ran the flipped TPB editions. Then the big industry-wide switch to un-flipped takubon style came to the series midway, so all the later issues are that style. The early editions of the TPB, as they go to 2nd editions, where replaced with the un-flipped takubon style as well. Or you can get free digital copies at mangawall.com, or mangapanda.com. Dark Horse is also converting the series to digital download as well. Options galore for this one.
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