MISC. MANGA, *Imperfect Hero

There have been some anime and manga that make fun of the whole Super Sentai(or “Power Rangers”)genre. One of the funniest is the Special Combat Duty Shinesman OVA, plus the recent Astro Fighter Sunred TV series. Nankin Gureko went a little step further by turning it into a romantic situation comedy.

A group of five costumed teen superheroes known as the High School Battalion Unit: Gakusei 5. Each of the maintains a secret indentity as regular students, even Gakusei Red who for some reason always wears his sentai helmet. They try to protect the world from the evil subterranean “menace” of the Gundark, an army of faceless minions who are lead by their busty leader, the sexy queen Mayura. However, during one of their typical battles, Mayura has her tiny horn on her head broken off and seems to loose her memory. She wanders off away from her henchmen, and is found by Yuji, who is secretly G-Green from Gakusei 5, the most underappreciated member of the group. Yuji is also the one who accidently knocked off Mayura’s horn. He takes her home out of guilt, and she decides to stay with him to find a boyfriend on the surface world. With the help of her size-changing flying Pokemon-like pet Poyo, the newly-frazzled Mayura causes enough problems around town gorging on chocolate and trying to find Yuji while he’s at school. Yuji tries to keep Mayura’s real identity secret from his teammates, much to the shigrin of Momoyama, the resident Pink Ranger who Yuji has a crush on. Mayura inevitably decides to make Yuji her boyfriend, to which he isn’t totally against(she is a voluptuous anime girl, after all!), but the other Gundark might have different plans for their queen.

This was a pleasantly funny manga. It was actually very funny throughout the whole three volumes, without giving into a lot of parody stereotypes. It would’ve been a little funnier to me if the Gakusei had some vehicles or a regular giant robot, but it might’ve taken time away from the rom-com aspects of the story. Even if your not a big fan of Japanese superheroes, this is still a pretty hilarious manga.