By Yana Toboso. Released in Japan as “Kuroshitsuji” by Square Enix, serialization ongoing in the magazine GFantasy. Released in North America by Yen Press.

Black Butler was doomed to be a hit in North America the moment it was licensed. And everyone knew it. Sure enough, it’s at the top of last week’s New York Times bestseller list for manga. It has a handsome bishonen butler on the cover! This is to female readers what maids are for guys, one would imagine.

I think the key to understanding this story is in the author’s notes at the end, where Toboso-san notes that she wanted to draw a cool butler, but had no ideas beyond that. And indeed, one of the strengths of the manga is that the butler *is* cool. If you’re going to brag about your manga with an awesome butler, you better back it up. Sebastian is quick-thinking, clear-headed, fights like a pro, and is basically the butler of your dreams, provided you don’t mind selling your soul.

Unlike the other major butler manga coming out here, Hayate the Combat Butler, this series is for the most part action-oriented, with occasional forays into angsty drama. What comedy there is comes from the rest of the staff of the house, who are all goofy ditzes who could probably have their personalities swapped and you’d never know. Their goal is to be the Greek Chorus, screw things up so that the butler can fix them, and be goofy. They succeed. I’m not fond of them, but they succeed at what they need to do.

As for Sebastian’s master, Ciel, he’s a grumpy loli. Yes, he’s male, but that merely makes him a grumpy male loli (a shota). He’s 12 years old, but his maturity level ranges from 6 to 35 depending on what the plot requires. There is an element of not-quite-yaoi here that I choose to ignore, even though I know it’s a major reason this title is as popular as it is. But hey, if I can read CLAMP I can read this.

Not sure I will continue to read this, though. There is one major problem I had with this first book. It reads like the author is connecting the dots of an evil-butler picture book. Every single plotline is so calculated, so designed to do what it does, that you can almost see each piece slot into place. The revelation of what Sebastian really is, towards the end of this book, is no surprise whatsoever. In fact, nothing here is a surprise. Everything happens the way that it was laid out, and while it looks pretty, there’s nothing that made me go “Ooooh, WOW!”.

It’s a good manga. There’s lots of pretty boys, and fights, and the promise of more evil leering grins in volumes to come. But if someone was to write a manga that would be designed to hit #1 on the NYT bestseller list (and indeed on Japan’s bestseller lists)… well, it would be Vampire Knight. But this would be a close second. If you can get past that, you’ll probably enjoy Black Butler a great deal.