Look to the front of most teen-aged Tokyopop graphic novel paperbacks and chances are you'll find at least one ad for a book about a sexy mechanical babe. They're all over the shonen manga map, apparently - A.I. Love You, Doll, Saber Marionette J - a testimony to the allure of hot artificial girlishness for a certain age of adolescent boy. I can attest to the appeal myself: I have fond memories of a pre-Catwoman Julie Newmar playing a shapely robot opposite Robert Cummings in the short-lived mid-sixties sitcom, My Living Doll. The show was no great shakes, but I was fourteen when it premiered, and, lemme tell ya, that didn't matter one whit. I still think its cancellation was one of the great injustices of series television, even if the redoubtable Miz N. did eventually rebound into Batman and a place in drag queen mythology.

So it was, in a desire to reacquaint myself with a (the word is unavoidable) seminal teenboy fantasy that I decided to check out the robot grrl action. Fingering my way through the manga section at Borders for a suitable title, I settled on Bunjura Nakayama & Bow Ditama's Mahoromatic (a.k.a. Automatic Maiden), an Older Teen series (Age 16+ - and wouldn't the fourteen-year-old Bill have loved that?) that's described in the helpful upper-right-hand corner of the back cover as "Comedy/Action" and is also source for an anime series. The series seems suited to my purposes because a.) it's fairly new to American shores (the publication date for Volume One is May 2004) and b.) the cover shows our title heroine wearing an old fashioned maid's uniform. Pretty kicky, think I, as I grab the first book and take it home for a look-see.

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Volume One opens with four color pages, two of which depict the heroine in mild tease poses - one in her jammies, holding a large pillow; the second in her maid's costume, staring open-eyed at the reader as she lugs a pail of water - then with the image of this selfsame femme, Mahoro, in skin-tight battle garb. In the early 80's, we're told, Earth was secretly invaded by aliens. To defend the planet, an android, "the strongest warrior mankind had ever known," was created by an organization called Vesper. With the invasion quelled, Mahoro, who naturally resembles a lithe and big-eyed teengirl, is given the opportunity to live her remaining life span (37 days if she continues to fight for Vesper, 398 if she allows her armaments to be removed) as she chooses. Cut to orphaned junior high school student Suguru Misato, telling two of his buddies over bowls of Ramen noodles that he's planning on hiring a maid. Suguru, we quickly learn, lives by himself and is definitely in need of someone to clean up his life.