Oh My Goddess! Volume Four is a manga with the story and art by Kosuke Fujishima, and it was published in North America by Dark Horse Manga. This review is for the second printing of this volume, which was released in 2007. There isn’t a rating printed anywhere on this volume, but after reading it, I would recommend Oh My Goddess! to manga readers who are 12 or 13 years of age and older.
I believe I’m finally in a point in the Oh My Goddess! manga that I’ve gotten past the material that was used as the basis for the Oh My Goddess! OVA series. So now I’m finally seeing stories and characters that I am completely unfamiliar with.
One of the big changes in Volume Four is the introduction of the character Mara. Mara is a demon who wants to separate Keiichi and Belldandy, and is introduced when one of the characters purchases a possessed CD and tries to play it. Most of this volume focuses on Mara and the plans the demon tries to carry out in order to make Keiichi and Belldandy miserable.
Since I like music in addition to manga and anime, I found the music references included in this volume to be amusing. Lines like “That’s right, Mara! It’s a double disc set!” and “They’re a 2-CD set, you know… not available on LP or cassette” made me chuckle a little bit. While the LP and cassette references do date the story, I still found these lines of dialogue to be humorous.
The end of this volume includes another “Letters to the Enchantress” section, and it focuses on two themes: attempting to create a timeline for the series up to this point and breaking down what the characters’ names mean in Japanese. There is plenty of commentary sprinkled in by editor Carl Gustav Horn, which helps to explain some of the observations that are made.
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