Maria the Virgin Witch vol. 1

In one of those wars of the medieval era where France and England are fighting each other (there were so many that they start to blend together after a while), a witch named Maria lives in a forest.  When she’s not helping out local villagers, she’s working to defuse the conflict in her own way.  This can either mean sending out her succubus familiar Artemis to wring the leaders of an upcoming battle dry before the fighting starts, or by bringing some kind of mythical/magical beast — we get to see a dragon, a wyrm, and a golem in this volume alone — to actively disrupt the fighting.  While Maria has the best of intentions, you know what they say about those and the road to Hell.  Particularly when the fighting is being observed by the Archangel Michael.  Thanks to his involvement (and some divine intervention), we find out that the whole “virgin witch” title isn’t a random thing but a key part of this series’ plot.

In all honesty, I didn’t pick this volume up because I was particularly excited to read about the adventures of a virgin witch.  This series comes to us from mangaka Masayuki Ishikawa who gave us the fun college-fun-with-anthropomorphic-microbes series “Moyasimon,” which had two volumes released out here before Del Rey disintegrated/transmogrified into Kodansha Comics.  I figured that picking this volume up will hopefully show that the mangaka does have an audience who wants to read more of his works.  The fact that this series is only three-plus-one volumes means that if it’s terrible I won’t have to suffer it for very long.

Fortunately this volume is an amusingly ribald (or “ecchi” if you prefer) comedy with a fresh perspective and some interesting ideas at its core.  I haven’t read many comedy series with sex as a driving factor that feature a female protagonist, so Maria’s perspective on things was interesting to behold.  Yes, most of the humor is centered around her lack of sexual experience.  The good news is that there’s enough variation on that setup here to generate just enough laughs to sustain the volume.  I also liked seeing the clash of ideals between Maria and Michael.  Particularly as the archangel makes some good points about the witch’s reasons for trying to end the war and the role of angels in maintaining the way of the world.  It keeps him from becoming a simple antagonist and leaves me interested in seeing how Maria is going to interpret his words going forward from here.

If you don’t like your humor tinged with sexual content or innuendo, then what’s here will likely be more irritating than endearing.  Particularly if you disagree with Ishikawa’s apparent “gayness=max lulz” way of thinking.  This first volume of “Maria the Virgin Witch” doesn’t make me forget that my main reason is a (misguided, slim) hope that we’ll get more volumes of “Moyasimon” if it sells well enough.  Even so, it’s a fun bit of fluff so far that I felt to be worth my time.