Happy Mania, the romance series for Borderline Personality Disorder teengirls everywhere.

One volume in, and I have a difficult time getting a sense of where my sympathies are supposed to lie - which is okay, but certainly different from American genre comics. It's clear that other characters find Shigeta irritating: at one point, her older roommate Fuku is shown thinking, "It's really hard to believe you're 24 years old," while the first volume ends with Takahashi plaintively asking the reader, "Can someone please tell me why I like Miss Shigeta!" Tokyopop's cover blurb compares our lead to Bridget Jones, but unlike that comically neurotic heroine, Anno's protagonist displays little capacity for even misdirected self-analysis.

Anno's black-and-white art is clean and simple, but not as sexually charged as the book's cover image would suggest. Our heroine's big-eyed look (often with blank pupils that make her appear like she's from a Harold Gray adaptation of Fatal Attraction) often works against her attractiveness. At least one scene is disturbingly rendered - Shigeta examining her naked self in a mirror and cataloging her perceived deficiencies - which I think is the point. (Second volume in the series features a cover more in tune with Anno's story: Shigeta with lipstick smeared all over and around her mouth, looking anything but the romance comic heroine.) A few times we're also treated to Shigeta's fantasies without any warning. When she returns home from one of her one-night-stands, for example, Anno draws her like a Legionnaire returning from service in the desert. In other panels, we see her in what I think of as a standard manga pose: mouth opened widely like some comics incarnation of Lucy Ricardo.

Is this comedy or serious romance, character flaw or pure pathology? Darned if I know, but it sure makes the sight of a young Aunt May flashing a condom in Trouble look tame. One thing's certain: if I wanted to open my journey into manga GNs with something different from American comic mores, I couldn't have picked much better than Happy Mania. An essentially unlikable heroine misusing her sexuality in pursuit of an army of superficially attractive men, who basically lacks the wit to make her emotionally stunted state entertaining over the long haul - I'm not sure I want to meet the audience who identifies with Shigeta's travails. Like our anti-heroine, I bet they'd be really aggravating.

(Originally posted in Pop Culture Gadabout.)