Of course, I couldn't let the month pass without talking about a bad harem manga, but this one is both different from the rest and yet not all that different either.
HAPPY LESSON, written by Mutsumi Sasaki and Dengeki G's Magazine with art by Shinnosuke Mori. First published in 1999 and first published in North America in 2004.
PLOT:
Susumu Arisaka is an orphan who has spent the last decade in an orphanage. Now he's returning to his parents' home to attend high school. Five of his teachers learn about his predicament and are so moved by his tragic life story that they decide to all become his "mama." They move in with him, cook and clean for him, tutor him, all in the hopes of giving him a happy life...or a lot of chaos for poor Susumu.
STORY:
Happy Lesson is trying so very hard to be different from the other post-Love Hina harem stories. It's trying to rise above the crowd. It's trying to be sentimental instead of skeevy. That's an admirable goal, except that not only does it fail, it has nothing else to fill that space in return.
The biggest problem is that this doesn't have a plot - just a premise. Once all the ladies move into Susumu's house, the writers just give up and each subsequent chapter revolves around some half-baked, unrelated idea. Oh no, one of the girls lost the household wallet, and they have to survive for a month on a few hundred yen! Oh no, the ladies want to spend more time with Susumu and thus decide to home school him for a while! Oh no, Susumu has to play the princess in the school play! Each chapter just stumbles along until it runs out of gags, leaving little in the way of resolution and nothing in the way of character progress.
In fairness, there's no characters here to progress. Susumu is distinguished only by his gender and his low-key annoyance at being inconvenience and occasionally embarassed in his own home. The 'mamas' are all one-note stock characters, all of whom have the depth of the Spice Girls' personas. There's the sensitive one! The otaku! The sporty one! The traditional one! When not performing their respective quirks, they tend to blend into the background, as if they were some sort of mildly obnoxious feminine mass.
While Happy Lesson strives to avoid the most obviously horny parts of the harem genre, it's not entirely chaste either. Just because Susumu isn't falling into their boobs or stumbling upon them in the bath doesn't mean that he isn't forced to sleep in the same bed as his 'mamas,' have them comment on naked baby pictures, and basically end up going on dates with a few of them. These ladies may call themselves 'mamas,' but they are clearly being set up as love interests and if anything this motherly pretense just makes those romantic undertones kind of creepy. That's not even getting into the notion that being a 'mother' to this otherwise perfectly capable teen boy means that all of these grown-ass women are essentially waiting on him hand and foot, whether he asks for it or not. The laziness of the writing combines with these weird undercurrents to create a work that manages to be just as repellent as the rest of its contemporaries without any of the jiggle.
ART:
Mori's art does Happy Lesson no favors either. His take on the characters is very basic, to the point that at times it's hard to distinguish Susumu from some of the more tomboyish women. The panel layout is a total jumble at time, a mess of trapezoids, layers, and clutter that's impossible to parse. To add insult to injury, the English language release of this suffers from both poor image quality (we're talking early Tokyopop levels of fuzzy, muddy scans) and poor lettering, particularly at the times when they had to fill in vertical speech bubbles.
RATING:
This series was published by ADV Manga. This series is complete in Japan with 2 volumes available. 1 volume was released and is currently out of print.
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