Language: English
Direction: Right to Left
By: Kosuke Fujishima
Publisher: Dark Horse
Type: Series
Genre: Drama, Seinen, RomanceSynopsis:
College student Keiichi Morisato thought it was a prank when a strange, beautiful young woman appeared in his dorm room one night. But his unexpected visitor is literally a goddess from heaven, Belldandy, come to grant him any single wish of his choosing. When Keiichi wishes for Belldandy to stay with him forever, it’s the beginning of a complicated, cosmic saga of comedy and romance that makes for one of manga’s greatest love stories!
I arrived late to the game in regards to Oh My Goddess, sort of, i picked up some of the original comics years ago. And i missed the original two runs of the manga, the first run because i hated flipped manga, and the second, because it started when i’d given up on manga.
So, i’ve always been a little sad about not being able to pick up the series. Thankfully Dark Horse have a brain and like money, so realised that releasing a omnibus version would probably be a good idea. How right they were!
What’s more they upped their game, giving it a larger size format, higher quality paper, and full colour inserts.
Overall the quality of this release is, frankly, amazing. Which to be honest isn’t that unexpected given Dark Horse’s recent run of omnibus editions. Frankly i recommend buying this series now just for the quality release this is. That’s before we even get into how awesome this series is!
For the newcomers to the series lets talk about it for a bit.
The story follows the turbulent relationship of one Keiichi and his girlfriend the Goddess Belldandy. And that is essentially the entire series.
They face numerous hurdles, in the form of family from both sides getting involved resulting in comical events. Especially when it’s Belldandy’s family, who seem to make eccentrics look perfectly sane and normal.
You Urd, a Goddess that can and will, lie though her teeth in a bid to get Keiichi and Bell together. She’s also not above whipping up the odd potion or pill to help them as well, except it usually goes wrong in some form or another.
Then you’ve got Skuld the youngest of the three sisters, who is a tech maniac and likes to build various mechanical contraptions, that usually blow up….when Keiichi is on them. She doesn’t particularly like Keiichi, and seems hell bent on splitting them up….or is she….
Then of course you’ve got various other Goddess’ and Demons all out to wreak various forms of havoc in their own comical way, usually resulting in some very bizarre and comical scenarios. You’d think that was bad enough, but nope, Keiichi’s own friends can make the other problems seem tame, as his college friends have a habit of landing him hot water, without telling him about it.
The various character dynamics we get throughout the series make for an amazing read, and Fujishima does and excellent job on both the art and story…for the most part. The art does go through changes over the course of the series. Which isn’t totally unexpected given how long the series has gone on for (26 years all told). But for me this also a bad thing, since the art does have some significant changes, and I personally preferred how he drew certain characters originally. But this is personal opinion.
However the story is where this has it’s issues. While it certainly is one of the best series i’ve read, it’s length is it’s curse. It goes on for so long and there’s so little development between Keiichi and Bell that it gets damn annoying at times. Thankfully unlike some other long series this one does end reasonably well, and doesn’t leave you hanging.
That said, lets be honest, this is still a damn good series and you should get this one! Thanks Dark Horse for releasing this awesome series for a third time!
