Review: NEGIMA! MAGISTER NEGI MAGI

 It's back to school time here at The Manga Test Drive!  God knows there were plenty of magic school harem manga to pick from in the 2000s, and while today's title is not strictly a magical school title it did involve both schools and magic and was one of the most popular examples of its kind.

NEGIMA! MAGISTER NEGI MAGI (Maho Sensei Negima!), by Ken Akamatsu.  First published in 2003 and first published in North America in 2004.

 

PLOT:

Negi Springfield is a magical genius, a boy who managed to graduate from the magic academy at the tender age of 10.  Curiously, his first assignment after graduation is to become an English teacher at Mahora Academy, a non-magical, all-girl's school in Japan.  He's got his work cut out for him, considering that he has to keep over 30 rowdy girls in check, share a room with the hot-tempered Asuna, and keep her from blabbing to everyone that he has magic powers.  

STORY:

It is often said that Ken Akamatsu did not want to make another harem manga after finishing Love Hina, but was pressured into doing so by his editor.  If so, that certainly explains why Negima! feels so damn derivative and overstuffed, right from the start.

At the very least, Negi makes a better first impression than Keitaro did.  Negi is no whiny nebbish, just a bright, good-natured kid who wants to become the best wizard he can be to help people.  Notably, he's too young and earnest to want to be inappropriately horny with his students, even if Akamatsu does everything in his power to thrust him into horny scenarios and accidents for the sake of "comedy."  

The same cannot be said of Asuna, who in many ways is just Naru with her tsundere-ness cranked to 11.  Practically from the moment she's introduced, she's raging at Negi for completely arbitrary reasons and nursing an unrequited crush on an older teacher to boot.  Every moment with her is a trial, which is a problem because so far she's the most prominent character in this story's oversized harem and Akamatsu is about as subtle about indicating her as the primary love interest as he was with Naru in Love Hina...which is to say, not subtle at all.

It has to be said: 30 members may be a normal size for a classroom's worth of students, but it's far, FAR too many characters for a harem manga.  Akamatsu is already struggling for ideas, filling them out with things like "token fat girl," "token Chinese girl," and "robot girl who is a pretty naked ripoff of that robot girl from ToHeart."  Only a handful get any sort of screentime in this volume and in most cases it's either to establish their particular gimmick or do a gag.  It doesn't take long for them to turn any scene into pure, fatuous chaos, which only further aggravated the bad mood this book instilled in me.  By the midpoint of the volume I was ready to chuck it at the wall, which is about as bad of a first impression as you can make with a first volume.

ART:

Akamatsu's art style hadn't changed too much between Negima! and its predecessor.  He still favors a simple if generically cute and somewhat angular style of character design, although at least he has at least tamed his tendencies towards giving all his girls giant hair antennae or tall, vented bangs.  That said, the only one that stands out is Negi himself, with his little glasses, his tiny stature, and the magic staff that is taller than he is.  It's not enough to hide the influence of Harry Potter in his design (especially from the early books), but it's not distracting.  

What is distracting is the fanservice, which if anything is more egregious than ever.  It goes beyond the expected accidental panty flashes and totally plot-necessary bath scenes.  This manga's idea of a funny running gag is having Negi sneeze anytime he gets too flustered, which leads to magical wardrobe malfunctions in any and all girls who happen to be nearby (but mostly Asuna).  When this happens, Akamatsu puts these girls' bodies on display as much as possible in a way that feels not just shameless but kind of gross.  

PRESENTATION:

This was one of the four debut titles for Del Ray Manga, and their inexperience shines in their unfortunate choice of letterers.  I don't know who all was part of "Studio Cutie," but their tendency to make all the text in the early chapters super-small (leaving way too much room in the word bubbles) was a wrong one.  It does seem to have been corrected in the book's second half, but that just means that the editor failed to ensure that everything was consistent before the book went to press.

I did not have access to the later Kodansha release, so unfortunately I cannot compare the translators or tell you if they fixed these lettering inconsistencies.  Hell, I didn't even know it got an omnibus re-release until I started writing this review.  

RATING

Negima! is magical only in how quickly it irritated me.  I cannot imagine reading nearly 40 more volumes of this if the rest of them are as fatuous and brainlessly horny as this one.

This manga was published by Kodansha Comics, and previously Del Ray Manga.  This series is complete in Japan with 38 volumes.  All 38 volumes were released in both single volumes and 9 3-in-1 omnibuses; all are physically out of print but available digitally through most digital manga vendors.