AltWeeklies Wire » Books » Fiction

"DearS" season

By J. Caleb Mozzocco
Columbus Alive | January 20, 2005
In the very near future, earth will play host to a stranded race of humanoid aliens that we’ll affectionately call “Dears,” apparently because we’re so fond of the visitors, who look just like humans (only more beautiful) and they’re all around nicer. Slovenly, girlfriendless high school student Takeya doesn’t get what the rest of the world sees in them, however, and he’s suspicious of their alien origins.

Which makes his lap the perfect one to drop a Dears into, at least for the storytelling purposes of "DearS" (Tokyopop), a take on the high school highjinks and awkward boy-meets magical-alien-girl formula that runs rampant in manga. But formulas are formulas for a reason, and the fact that DearS evokes the likes of Video Girl Ai, Chobits, Mahoromatic, and, most especially, Oh My Goddess! (visually, at least) is as reassuring to fans of the genre as it is tiresome to its critics.

Produced by Peach-Pit and featuring extremely slick art, the first volume is mostly dedicated to set-up, introducing us to Takeya, his naïve Dears visitor Ren and the supporting cast at their school. We’ll have to wait until the next volume to see whether Peach-Pit can transcend the genre or simply draw a nice version of it. Smart money’s on the former though; after all, it’s already big in Japan, right?
Tags: DearS, manga, Peach-Pit

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