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It's unusual for me to pick up a book like Dark Horse's
Oh My Goddess! Colors, the primer/retrospective for the ongoing (both in Japan and in U.S. translation)
seinen manga series by Kosuke Fujishima. Generally, if I do read a companion text, I prefer a collection of critical essays rather than, say, a diagram of the interior of the Millennium Falcon. But,
Oh My Goddess! was one of the first, if not the first, manga I read (about the same time I was reading Charles Burns'
Skin Deep and Alan Moore and David Lloyd's
V for Vendetta, brought to me by the county library and the call number 741.5952), and, as the metallic-gold cover helpfully points out,
Oh My Goddess! is "the longest-running manga series in English."
OMG!C also states that there wasn't anything else like the title when it first appeared in the U.S. (direct) market in 1994 in single-issue form (and latter collected in flopped volumes), and while the basic plot — when college student Keiichi calls a wrong number, a goddess, Belldandy, appears and, when she grants him one wish, he wishes that she would be with him always, causing an infinite number of complications, especially when her sisters and other supernatural beings interfere — at this juncture sounds painfully generic, at the time the closest thing to it available was Rumiko Takahashi's
Ranma ½, and Fujishima's delicate sensibility is about 180 degrees away from the bawdy, violent charm of Takahashi's
shōnen series.
OMG! has some fundamental flaws (in fact,
OMG!C opens with an eight-page comic by
Evangelion Angel designer Yoshitoh Asari, a friend of Fujishima's, which cheerfully lists them): the blandness of the couple Keiichi and Belldandy, and their extreme lack of personal and relationship development are chief among them (according to
OMG!C, 30 volumes in, Keiichi is practicing how to tell Belldandy how much he loves her).
(Fortunately, the supporting cast, while still types, has much more to do: Belldandy's sister Urd is half-goddess, half-demon, and this makes for some exciting storylines). The stunted growth of the two main characters, however, gestures as something closed off about the
OMG! universe: though Fujishima has constructed an elaborate cosmology for the series (Norse mythology structured by a computer and administered through a bureaucracy), it doesn't invite the imagination or inspire curiosity the same way richer ones do.
Where
OMG! does manage to channel the sublime is in its art: at best, it's a refined fusion of fantasy and pin-up. Fujishima details motorcycles (Keiichi is an engineering student who belongs to the Motor Club) and women with equal love and equal warmth; hours could be well spent looking at the folds in his unique clothing designs (at one point, Skuld, Belldandy's youngest sister,
appears to be wearing pink sock-boots with zig-zag hems — studded with red beads — and matching gloves, and it somehow manages to look cute and totally appropriate for her character).
Speed, too, is something that Fujishima's art communicates clearly, as many conflicts in the book are settled through racing. When the manga has an opportunity for color-work, it's usually in a pastel palette that is sensitive without being sappy, so showcasing that in the companion was a canny move. The bulk of the praise in the afterward from
MegaTokyo creator Fred Gallagher (who cites
OMG! as an influence) is for the art. (Unfortunately,
OMG!C doesn't include any
Adventures of the Mini-Goddesses, a lively set of side stories, drawn in chibi form, in which the goddesses cope with rat-ninja.)
It's difficult not to try to place
OMG! in a continuum — as a forbearer to
Chobits and
Love Hina in the U.S. market, certainly, and as a transitional point from Magical Girl to Magical Girlfriend (the latter trope is not new to U.S. readers, either, as it had been established in novels and films far earlier than in syndicated '60s television via
Bewitched and
I Dream of Jeanie). I imagine its appeal for its Japanese target audience of 18-30 year old males is very similar, and very comforting: that even the most average schmo can get a pretty, sweet lady to ride on his wicked wheels with him always.
And now that a U.S. manga fan can get a hold of sophisticated works they never would have dreamed of in 1994 — Fumi Yoshinaga's
Ōoku: The Inner Chambers Vol. 1, in which the gender dynamics of 1700s Japan are reversed, comes out this month, for example — it's hard to pay attention to something like
OMG!. Although it's now just narratively spinning its wheels (though its art remains as exquisite as ever), perhaps its longevity can be accounted for by some of its strategies similar to those employed by the Big Two (adding in new characters, aging the characters only slightly, etc.): unlike the comics that Change Everything Forever and Nothing will Ever be the Same™, however,
OMG! actually did (sort of. A little bit.) — and
Oh My Goddess! Colors serves as a beautifully packaged footnote to that effect.
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2010
