It's time for a spring cleaning before our big TENTH ANNIVERSARY, so let's do a month of maid manga! Sadly, I reviewed the best maid manga out there in English nearly a decade ago, so what's left is often a lot of garbage. That being said, few of the maid manga out there are as bad as this.
MOE USA, by Atsuhisa Okura. First published in North America in 2007.
PLOT:
Ruby and Patty are two young eager weeaboos anime fans ready to enjoy their first trip to Japan. They take in all the sights (and shops) that Akihabara has to offer but their plans go awry when the cosplay costumes of their dreams turn out to be too pricey for their budget. They decide that their only option is to go home make their own damn costumes work in a maid cafe to earn the necessary funds. They get off to a bad start with a haughty employee, but when they discover a pair of magical maid uniforms they set out on a path to fame, fortune, and attaining the ultimate level of moe.
STORY:
You could rightfully argue that I shouldn't be reviewing this at all, as while it was made by a Japanese artist it was made primarily for an English-speaking audience by a publisher that makes "how to draw manga" books and therefore is Not Manga. I would counter that with this: if I had to suffer through this, I had to share that pain with others if simply to make that suffering worth it.
That being said, Moe USA might be THE most embarrassing weeaboo nonsense I have ever had the misfortune to read. This comic makes Megatokyo look like a nuanced, complex masterpiece in comparison. It is a thousand naive teen fantasies of Japan distilled into a single comic. It's so rock-stupid that you want to believe that it's meant to be satire. Sadly, it is 100% real and 100% serious.
Patty and Ruby are less like proper characters and more like small children or perhaps anthropomorphized puppies that got lost and ended up in this story. There's little to distinguish them beyond Ruby's skin color and Patty's ditziness. Together they act like the most cringeworthy tourists, constantly agape at everything around them and letting their childish excitement overtake anything resembling good sense. The first few pages are just these two exploding forth with "HI! WE'RE AMERICANS! OMG, THERE'S A REAL-LIFE OTAKU OVER THERE! LET'S TALK AT HIM LOUDLY IN A LANGUAGE HE DOESN'T UNDERSTAND! CAN WE TOUCH YOU LIKE SOME SORT OF SPECIMEN? CAN WE BARGE INTO YOUR PERSONAL SPACE WITHOUT ASKING? YOU'RE OK WITH US TREATING YOU LIKE A MONKEY AT THE ZOO, RIGHT? NEVERMIND, THERE'S ANOTHER SHINY THING OVER THERE, BYEEEEEE!"
To these girls, Japan is just one big anime-centric theme park that exists only to cater to them. Their only interest in the country is getting all their otaku shit straight from the source and it's frustrating that these two are never punished or shamed for acting like tactless toddlers in public. But then, why would it? If anything, from this point onward Moe USA exists only to praise these two girls and reinforce their belief that Japan is the magical otaku fairyland of their dreams.
From the moment that these two discover their...*sigh*...magical maid uniforms, Patty and Ruby never experience the slightest bit of struggle. The world bows down and caters to their slightest whims because apparently you can become an international star just by being a big, dumb baby in the body of a teen girl. (Insert your own jokes about reality TV actors here.) The only person who doesn't fall for them is Sayuri, the chief waitress at the maid cafe. Patty and Ruby have overtaken her spot as queen bee of the cafe, and she exists only to be a jealous, cackling pantomime villain. As archetypal as Sayuri might be, I would far sooner read her story than the one we got.
For as much as 'moe' is name-dropped here, Okura clearly doesn't understand the first thing about it. At most, he knows it involves cute girls doing cute things without any of the personality or relatability that defines the best examples of it. I can't imagine anyone feeling moe over two obnoxious kids with nothing going on under their empty smiles other than an endless appetite for attention and consumption.
ART:
According to Jason Thompson, Okura supposedly won Best New Artist awards from both Kodansha and Shueisha, but if that's true it must have been during a year when the judges buried their standards in the ground. If not for the name on the cover, I could easily accept the idea that this was drawn by some nameless teen who purchased one of the publisher's how-to-draw books. Okura makes everyone look like weird rubbery babies, with perfectly round heads, noseless doll-like faces, and weirdly smooth bodies. His backgrounds are nothing but boring gradients. The only think that Okura could be bothered to draw competently and competently were the maid uniforms, as every frill and fold is rendered in lavish detail.
RATING:
This series is published by Japanime. All 3 volumes were published; the physical volumes are out of print but all 3 are available digitally.
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