By Rumiko Takahashi. Released in Japan by Shogakukan, serialized in the magazine Shonen Sunday. Released in North America by Viz.

With this volume, we get the last of the core cast of four introduced. Urusei Yatsura had a giant, sprawling cast of dozens, but when it came down to most of the stories, especially in the manga (which lacked Megane, as he and his cronies vanish starting with this volume) there were four leads: Ataru, Lum, Shinobu, and Shutarou Mendou, who makes his debut here.

Mendou’s arrival is sort of the ‘starting’ point of UY Mark 2: with it, the art spiffens up a little (only a little, mind), and the characterization is in place. Lum has become default cute, as opposed to default evil, though is still constantly jealous. Ataru is now firmly in pervert mode, losing any modicum of ‘normal guy’ he had in the first volume. And Shinobu, for the most part, abandons any attempts to win Ataru back from Lum, partly as he’s become the lecher we know and love, but mostly as she falls head over heels for Mendou, along with the rest of the class. She also gains the power of super strength when enraged here, picking up desks with ease to throw them at Ataru when enraged.

There is one story, the first in the volume, that falls in that small category that Viz decided to skip due to cultural issues. This is ‘Father, You Were Strong!’. where Kurama the crow woman takes Ataru back in time to meet her ancestor Ushiwaka, who as all Japanese readers know would go on to become Minamoto no Yoshitsune. She has Ataru there to learn how to be noble and warrior-like, but Ataru takes it upon himself to teach the innocent young Ushiwaka about girls. It’s a fun chapter, but I can see why, with all the historical references most North Americans wouldn’t get, Viz decided to skip it.

One chapter they didn’t skip, though I bet they wished they had while translating it, is ‘Disco Inferno’. (I think the original Japanese is ‘Battle Royale of Love’.) We meet Sakura’s lover Tsubame, who is a giant doofus who’s been studying magical arts in the West. He wants Sakura’s hand in marriage, but first has to get the approval of Cherry. Sakura, likely realizing she’s not ready for marriage yet, takes Ataru (and Lum) along in order to simply foul the whole thing up by his bad luck being around. They end up at a disco (the chapter came out in early 1980, when I believes the clubs were still big in Japan) and Cherry demands Tsubame prove he has enough spiritual power to be a good husband for Sakura. Tsubame, having studied Western spirits, decides to summon Satan. Sadly, he’s pathetic, so summons Santa instead. He then tries summoning a goat-headed demon, only to get Lum’s ex-boyfriend Rei, who wreaks more havoc by trying to kill Ataru, grab Lum, and also get hit on by every woman in the club. The puns are rampant in this chapter, which is why I noted the translators must have hated it.

Then, as I noted, Mendou shows up. He’s clearly there to make a big splash as a major new character. He arrives by helicopter, seduces the entire female class with his suave charm (including Shinobu), and then promptly falls for Lum. The females in the class clearly note Mendou’s huge advantage over all the other boys: he’s rich, and handsome. That’s it. This is made even more clear in a follow-up chapter, where Lum is annoyed that a computer says Mendou is her ideal match. She heads down to the classroom (at this stage in the series, she’s not a student) and tosses Mendou and Ataru, who are both Aries, into a giant alien horoscope thing to see who is her better match. After much wackiness, the astrology chart notes Mendou and Ataru… are equally bad. So Lum, who notes this means she can choose who she wants, picks Ataru. Having someone or something note that, if you take away Mendou’s money and looks, he’s just like Ataru will be a running theme of the series.

Finally, we have the first chapter where Takahashi throws a bone to the readers who like actual romance. She did this very little. The anime was much better at adding sweet moments where Lum and Ataru revealed that aw, they really do love each other. Takahashi actually thought they overdid it, and preferred the characters be jerks. But even she would give us the occasional chapter. This is the first, involving The guys sending a fake love letter to Ataru. They do this to shut Mendou up, as he’s received love letters from the entire female student population. Unfortunately, Ataru reacts to the letter far too much, convinced he has a new girl who’s mad for him. He dumps Lum on Mendou and runs off. Lum is annoyed, but then finds out that the guys faked the note, and the girl they were paying to pretend to be the writer has gotten sick. At first she tells herself Ataru deserves what he gets, but the thought of him being humiliated makes her tear up. (Note how far Lum has come from the first few chapters here.) So Lum dresses up as the writer of the note, and sweet talks Ataru. Ataru knows it’s her (the previous chapter ALSO had Lum dress as a human girl, but led to a far nastier, more electricity-filled conclusion) but goes along with it. As they walk home, Ataru notices, for perhaps the first time, how attractive Lum is, especially when she’s not flying around making his life miserable. He offers to hold her hand, and she accepts.

We still have a bunch of unlikeable protagonists here, mined for comedy in a way that exposes all their flaws and subjects them to constant humiliation. But at least now that Ataru and Shinobu are not being written sympathetically, there’s less of an imbalance to be found. And in the final chapter of this volume, we start to see that, given, oh, 31 more volumes, Ataru and Lum might develop real feelings for each other. Maybe.

By Rumiko Takahashi. Released in Japan by Shogakukan, serialized in the magazine Shonen Sunday. Released in North America by Viz.

We’re still early into Urusei Yatsura’s run, and Takahashi is still working on the characterization. Lum is still mostly unlikeable, and Shinobu wobbles between sympathetic long-suffering girlfriend and jealous harridan. This volume, however, does manage to solidify Ataru’s character. Having started out as merely your average incredibly unlucky teenager, by the end of this volume we have what would define him for the rest of the series – his excessive lust for women, and inhuman ability to do anything to try to get them.

Many at first might be surprised that UY has so many women after Ataru, considering what a horrible lech he is. This volume would agree with you, as it’s filled with people noting that Ataru is lazy, stupid, ugly, perverted, and just plain awful. Amusingly, this puts him one up on the rest of the cast. The reason all the females in the cast go after Ataru is he has a personality, and is far more interesting than the other faceless guys here (theoretically it’s Megane and company, but these zeebs are nothing like their anime versions). Moreover, Ataru may want to kiss, snuggle, and generally feel up anything female, but he draws a line at sexual assault, something the other guys around him have no issues with. This all reminds me why modern harem shows can get so tedious – the lead is a loser, but is also boring and ‘nice’. Ataru is neither.

We get two more major cast members introduced here, though as with Benten (who also drops in for a dream sequence cameo) they’ll leave for a while then come back with personality transplants. Oyuki the Neptunian princess is introduced in the first chapter, and seeing her trying (like Benten did 2 chapters earlier) to mack on Ataru is rather startling. Takahashi is famous for not plotting in advance, which means that early volumes of all her works can seem hideously out of character later on, and Oyuki is a prime example of that. We also meet Kurama, the crow-princess Ataru wakes with a kiss, and thankfully she is exactly as she’ll always be – warring between needing to have Ataru as her husband due to tradition and loathing the very sight of him.

As always, the humor stems from watching horrible things happen to horrible people. There’s less attempt to play on sympathy here, and Takahashi is already starting to move past the ‘Ataru/Shinobu/Lum’ triangle that was the majority of Volume 1. One chapter in particular struck me, with Lum creating a puppet Ataru that can move as she wishes. This naturally leads to her deciding to torture Shinobu with a similar puppet, and Ataru trying to stop her. It’s a fairly serious chapter in comparison – it’s still funny, but has a weird ending with Shinobu sobbing in her parents’ arms and Ataru simply walking home with a feeling of doom. It’s the death knell of Ataru as the normal guy, too – lech Ataru comes to the forefront from now on.

Two chapters in this volume were never translated by Viz when the series was coming out. This was easier back in the day, as the comics were coming out in 32-page ‘pamphlet’ format, and the audience did not have easy access to the originals to check, or the ability to whine on forums. The two chapters both deal with Japanese folklore more than the rest of the book, which may have been why they were skipped. They’re also the two weakest in the volume, which may have been another reason.

With this volume, we have our Ataru, but Lum is still clearly the villain of the series. She’s coming along a bit – one chapter sees her and Cherry teaming up to stop Ataru, the first time she’s been shown to work with anyone from Earth – but it’s hard to root for them as an actual couple. I’m hoping the next volume will change that, as it also introduces the last of the four ‘Star’ cast members, Shutaro Mendo.

By Rumiko Takahashi. Released in Japan by Shogakukan, serialized in the magazine Shonen Sunday. Released in North America by Viz.

(n.b. – I’m going to be reviewing these volumes as they came out in Japan’s V1, rather than in Viz’s Lum Perfect Collection. Hence this review covers chapters 1-9.)

I’ve been reviewing Rin-Ne, and while I enjoy it, one of my complaints was that Takahashi had made her two leads far too nice. Sure, they’re occasionally grumpy or protest when something stupid happens, but they’re generally nice people. You can imagine hanging out with them. This is not Takahashi’s usual schtick. She specializes in mining comedy out of horrible, unlovable people and making you enjoy it. So I thought I’d go way, WAY back to 1978, where she got her first big series for Shonen Sunday, which translates broadly as “Those Obnoxious Aliens”.

It strikes me that while Takahashi is a household name, UY is not necessarily one, so I will give a brief summary. Ataru Moroboshi, a luckless boy trying to hold a steady girlfriend in cute but untrusting Shinobu Miyaki while still finding time to look at other girls, is picked to represent Earth against a race of invading aliens. He has to play a tag race against the beautiful oni Lum, and if he loses the Earth will get invaded and he’ll be an outcast. But no pressure. Even worse, he wins, and through a series of wacky misunderstandings, Lum ends up thinking they’re engaged. Now Lum is living with him, Shinobu hates him, and he *still* has his horrible luck ensuring that bad things happen to him every chapter.

It’s immediately striking how simply awful the entire cast is. Ataru is the most sympathetic, and even that’s just because of getting so much crap piled on top of him, not because of any innate likability. Shinobu is ready to mistrust him and storm off at a moment’s notice, even when it’s clear from his words and the scene in front of her that he’s not guilty. Now, one can argue having read most of the series that she is justified in that Ataru is a perverted lech, but we don’t see that here. We mostly just see a normal guy who occasionally likes to look at gorgeous women in a ‘hey, hot babe’ sort of way. The *real* Ataru only shows up in Chapter 8, which casually introduces space-biker babe Benten, where he drops everything and leaps up a tall pole to start macking on her. But in the first few chapters, it’s actually rather startling to see Ataru trying to stay faithful to Shinobu, and her hair-trigger temper doesn’t help in the least.

And then there’s Lum. Oh my god, what a harpy she is in these first few chapters. The mind just reels. The oft-told story is that UY was supposed to feature Ataru and Shinobu as the main character, with Lum as the ‘other woman’, but Lum’s insane popularity caused the editors and Takahashi to rewrite things to make Ataru and Lum the main couple. It’s so often told that it reeks of publicity, but I’d buy it judging by this volume, where my main wonder is how Lum got so popular just from this. Must have been the looks and bikini, as she is awful. Clingy and jealous, with a hair-trigger temper even worse than Shinobu’s, there’s absolutely no question why Ataru wants nothing to do with her. (At one point, his parents are away from home, and warn Ataru not to try anything while home with Lum. He genuinely sounds annoyed they’d think that of him. Oh, Ataru, where are you?)

That said, the last chapter of the volume, showing Ataru and Lum having to deal with fallout from Lum’s cooking (legendarily bad, in the best manga tradition) shows them bouncing off each other quite well, certainly better than he does with the normal Japanese girl Shinobu. I suspect this, more than any popularity contests, might be why Takahashi turned towards Ataru and Lum; they just click together.

There’s a lot of the major cast introduced here. Ataru’s horrible parents, Lum’s gruff father, Ataru’s 4 school friends (who Takahashi would quickly write out of the manga but who would be major characters in the anime – especially Megane). I’d mentioned Benten already, and we also meet Lum’s handsome-sometimes fiance Rei, who cares only about food and drives Lum crazy because of this. (Seeing her dealing with a bit of what Ataru has had to suffer from her makes you feel warm and happy.) We see the Shinto priestess Sakura, who I’d actually forgotten had been introduced as suffering from various heart conditions, diseases, and maladies, all of which vanish after her introductory chapter thanks to Ataru’s bad luck being stronger.

And then there’s Cherry. I’ve been going on and on about how unlikable the cast is in this series, but every Takahashi series seems to have one character whose mere presence causes the reader *and* the cast to react in irritation and loathing. In Maison Ikkoku it’s the freakish Yotsuya, in Ranma 1/2 it’s the perverse Happosai. And here it’s Cherry, the world’s worst Buddhist Monk, a short, ugly man whose main job seems to be annoying Ataru as much as is humanly possible and leeching food off of anyone he can find. Every line of dialogue he utters, from his portents of doom to his ludicrously awful puns makes you want him to vanish and never come back. He will be with us through the entire 34-volume series.

I feel I should note that the series was quite a hit, and not just because of young boys looking at shots of Lum in her bikini. Takahashi creates horrible people and makes them suffer horrible things because she’s an expert at making it funny, and this volume is funny. It’s not funny in a way where you identify with any of the characters, or share in their pain. It’s funny in a ridiculous, how-much-more-can-she-pile-on way, where you tune in next week to see if everything will finally snap under its own weight and fall into a pit. It is barely controlled chaos, right from Chapter 1. It’s also laden with puns, as I noted before, both subtle and blatant. Viz does a fairly decent job of trying to find Western equivalents for most of the weirder ones (Cherry’s are especially difficult to translate, as they’re so genuinely bad.)

If you can track down a copy of the Lum Perfect Collection somewhere, I do recommend it. Especially if you only know Takahashi from her Inu Yasha and Rin-Ne series, this is a great example of what happens when she just pushes on the accelerator and drives the entire manga careening out of control from the start. Sure, the art is terrible compared to her recent work, but it has its own late-70s shonen charm. More to the point, UY was a big influence on a double-dozen other series, and you’d say it was a parody of the hot magical girlfriend series (Tenchi, Oh My Goddess) if it didn’t come before *all* of them. Recommended with caution (UY can be hard to take, sort of like a loud Osaka comedian who can’t stop), but still recommended.