Enter Mahoro, who later turns out to have her own reasons for going into service in the Misato house. Our hero first spies the winsome android on a city bus, and, noting her uniform, immediately engages in some healthy teenboy fantasizing. His dream is disrupted, though, by the sudden appearance of two would-be bus hijackers. In a fit of power-mad piggishness, they order all the women on the bus to strip, including Mahoro. She passively follows the duo's orders, and we get a partly titillating/partly squirm-inducing full frontal shot of nekkid girlish android. Then the thugs threaten Suguru, and it's clobberin' time.

Gotta admit if I were still that 14-year-old Julie Newmar lover, I'd already be thinking on the basis of one chapter that Mahoromatic was the coolest comic ever. And that's before Nakayama & Ditama introduce main story adversary Saori, the ultra-buxom man-eating teacher who has her sights on the apparently wealthy Suguru. When the top-heavy sensei goes breast to breast against our unclothed heroine (not once, but twice in this volume!), it's everything my teenboy self wished was in those "Little Annie Fanny" comics I used to sneak a peak at in my Dad's Playboys. Saori may be a walking predatory cliché (at one point we read her self-satisfied thoughts as she strolls through school and set a hundred boy students' loins a-trembling), but she's also not much different from the lust-crazed male teachers that we meet in G.T.O.

Once Suguru hires his rescuer to be his live-in maid, the story takes a predictable path to those of us who still remember sixties sci-fi/fantasy sitcoms like Living Doll or Bewitched. Our hero knows his sexy maid is an android (though at first he has his doubts about her sanity), but he wants to keep this fact from his friends at school (a quintet of boys and girls, the most distinctive of which is a blond named Chizuko who's like a more compact Little Lotta in that all she does is gush about the food Mahoro packs for lunch) and his buttinski teacher Saori. He's attracted to his automatic maiden even as he realizes she isn't a living creature - when she steps into the tub to dutifully bathe(!) him, the moment is both erotic and infantilizing. Suguru nearly passes out, imagining that it's his mother who's washing and holding him, and, yes, I had the same thoughts that you're having right now when I first read that scene.

Mahoromatic may, at heart, be a sitcom, but it doesn't stint on comic glimpses into Japanese life. In one chapter, for instance, we visit a bath house owned by the family of Suguru's friend Miyuki; in another, we learn about ecchi, I'm told are mild Japanese girlie manga. Mahoro reacts to the presence of Suguru's ecchi collection by throwing them out - and later refers to Saori as an "ecchi sensei" - though why the android has such an immediate aversion to this material is not made clear. We also get some Iron Wok Jan! style depictions of Japanese meals fixed by Mahoro for her employer, including one the servant is forced to create from a nearly cashed refrigerator.