The peak of maid manga came at the beginning of the millennium, when literally any doofus could make a ecchi manga, throw some maids in it, and call it a day.
HANAUKYO MAID TEAM (Hanaukyo Maid-tai), by Morishige. First published in 1999 and first published in North America in 2003.
STORY:
Tarou didn't know what to expect when his dying mother bid him to go to his grandfather. He didn't expect his grandfather to be fabulously wealthy with a giant mansion full of horny maids to cater to his every need. He definitely didn't expect said grandfather to leave everything to Tarou. Now he has to learn how to navigate his life with an army of maids who create a lot of chaos in their attempts to manage every detail of his life.
STORY:
Hanaukyo Maid Team is a prime example of the sort of maid manga that were rampant in the early 2000s: deep as a puddle, borrowing heavily from Love Hina and its ilk, and padding things out with nonsense and fanservice in a mildly obnoxious and largely empty package. What really gets me is that the mangaka didn't do it alone, as "Morishige" was in fact a pseudonym for a husband-and-wife duo.
Tarou is pure Potato-kun: blandly nice, completely overwhelmed by anything remotely sexual, and little but a passive plaything for others to abuse. The only notable thing about him is his blatant crush on the head maid Mariel. That makes perfect sense, as they are a perfect match in blandness and niceness. They are surrounded either by one-note stock characters (like the Horny Best Friend or Haughty Rich Girl Rival) or one-note gimmick maids who are there primarily for annoying, breathless comedy. Even at the time, there's nothing here that you couldn't find in half a dozen other manga, and nothing that hadn't been done better by others.
ART:
Morishige's art is as dull as Tarou himself. Visually it's caught in the weird transitional period between the angular, hard-edged character designs of the late 1990s and the rounder, squishier ones that were just coming into vogue in anime and manga. You can see this happening with the characters, whose relatively realistic proportions are in conflict with their over-simplified faces and the thick lines Morishige draws them in. There are also points where they clearly forgot (or didn't bother) to draw in details, be in on backgrounds or things like the shoes characters wear.
The early chapters feature a lot of panty shots and boobs, but either by choice or by editorial dictate the focus shifts more towards wacky comedy. Normally I wouldn't have a problem with this, but it's clear that Morishige's talents lied more with the fanservice than with drawing comedy. They don't have a zany bone in their body, and it comes through on the page. Maybe things improved in later years, when the the mangaka's wife took over as the creative lead on their later ones.
PRESENTATION:
This is a later release from Studio Ironcat (which by this point had rebranded to IC Entertainment due to ridiculously convoluted circumstances), and it's hard to believe that something this amateurish was released by a professional company in 2003. There's the fact that they leave the original Japanese text on both the cover and spine, forcing them to awkwardly cram the English titles and credits around them. There's also the fact that the pages themselves are poorly printed and weirdly undersized, to the point that the outside edge of each page is awkwardly cut off. The translation is clunky, with an over-reliance on footnotes and a lot of typos. It reminds me of nothing so much as some of Tokyopop's earliest releases, although this is mercifully unflipped.
Taken altogether, it speaks of a release that was rushed out the door with the barest minimum of effort by a publisher that wasn't keeping up with its peers.
RATING:
This manga was published by Studio Ironcat/IC Entertainment. This series is complete in Japan with 14 volume available. 3 volumes were released and are currently out of print.
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