The Fall 2017 Manga Guide

SP Baby

What's It About? 

Tamaki Hasegawa is somewhat down on her luck – orphaned in high school, she's desperate to provide a college education for her younger brother, but because she's been raising him, she doesn't have the college degree most full-time employers are looking for. She's on her way to the rare job interview that will have her when she mistakes Kagetora Sugou's bodyguard for an attacker. She jumps in to save him, but since he didn't need it, all she ends up with is a torn skirt and a ruined interview. All is not lost, however, because Kagetora has taken an interest in Tamaki, and before she quite knows what's happening, he's offered her full-time work – as his bodyguard. Tamaki's happy to have the job, but she's not so sure about Kagetora himself. He seems to think they've met somewhere before and he's definitely too interested in just being with her rather than in letting her do her work. What's the real reason he's so keen on keeping Tamaki by his side? SP Baby is an original manga by Maki Enjōji. It will be published in November by Viz and retails for $9.99.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Lynzee Loveridge

Rating: 2

Heroine Tamaki is an “act first, think later” type, especially when it comes to strangers in trouble. Unfortunately for Tamaki, this instinctual reaction to protect those in danger has not won her accolades. Instead, she's a twenty-something part-time worker trying to make ends meet to take care of teenage brother. She has little confidence in her judgment and has resigned herself as a perpetual source of bad luck. It's exactly this time of middling abilities and low confidence that makes Tamaki a josei heroine and her characterization is only the first cliché the well-worn plot of SP Baby manages to trot out in the first volume.

Tamaki is also a never-been-kissed virgin crushing on her long time florist crush, Natsuo. Tamaki is not going to get together with Natsuo. I can tell you this because that's never how these stories work. Instead, she's going to inevitably fall for her new employer Kagetora, an extremely wealthy nephew of a politician that hires her on as his bodyguard, mostly because he likes her legs and partially because he knew her as a kid. The last part isn't said outright, but this is a by-the-numbers romance manga, and the hints are going to beat readers over the head. The last cliché is that Kagetora also has an inexplicable genetic medical condition that doesn't allow him to feel except by Tamaki. This bit is supposed to make Tamaki, a completely average woman, be special enough to warrant the constant physical advances by a good-looking, rich dude.

What makes the set-up especially tiring is that I've already 10 volumes of it. By the same author. SP Baby is written by Maki Enjōji whose previous work is Happy Marriage!?. That story also stars a young adult woman of a meager background who ends up the wife of a handsome and wealthy man, albeit a CEO, as a debt repayment. Enjoji apparently likes to write kept woman romances, which is fine if that's your cup of tea. Happy Marriage!? was essentially a bodice ripper where the main male love interest Hokuto was emotionally stunted but still jealous all the time. Kagetora isn't anything like that, but he has all the same boundary issues without any of the bad-boy appeal for what ultimately ends up being a rather bland chemistry between the two characters.

I can't overstate how much manga is produced in Japan nor how little of what's brought over is meant to appeal to an older, female demographic. It's a bit disappointing to see that for a genre that is still underrepresented in a lot of ways, we're getting little variety to choose from. That said, if you liked Happy Marriage!? and Midnight Secretary, this feels like a tamer version of the same dynamic.

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Amy McNulty

Rating:

SP Baby may check off a list when it comes to romantic josei manga—the dislike-to-love, the love triangle/square, the forceful love interest—but it adeptly threads together all the elements of this formula into an enjoyable, slightly distinctive first volume. Workplace romance settings have run the gamut from the average office to the restaurant kitchen, but how often is the romance between a woman bodyguard and her male employer, particularly when the woman had no ambition to work in the security industry? Tamaki is on the harried and flustered end of the josei/shojo lead spectrum, which makes her the perfect target to have her life almost forcefully turned on its head by the aggressive politician's nephew who crosses her path.

The main drawback of the series thus far has been clarification. The manga so zeroes in on the burgeoning professional/potentially-romantic relationship between Tamaki and Tora that it doesn't always stop to make sure every situation makes sense. Why, for example, was bodyguard (and Tamaki's eventual disdainful supervisor) Mike chasing Tora during Tamaki's first introduction to them? Was it a training exercise or was Tora trying to lose his tail for some privacy? It also makes little sense that Tama would mistake a man in hot pursuit of another as a “gay lovers' quarrel.” How does Tamaki have those legs of steel and instincts sharp as a tack? (She gets training while under their employ, but those initial talents are what draw Tora to her.) Is it really realistic that a politician's nephew would have such frequent attempts on his life that a mini-bomb in the garbage is no big deal? It also would have been nice to see more of Natsu, Tamaki's neighbor and long-time crush. It's clear as day she's not going to wind up with him since all the flags are set for Tora, but an actual rival for Tamaki's affections would have made for more conflict and drama. As it is, Natsu seems like a friendly, older brother figure and there's little indication he thinks of Tamaki in a romantic way.

Enjoji's art is clean with a maturity to the character designs appropriate for an older josei audience. It's even somewhat vintage in style, reminiscent of popular shojo series of the 1990s. Still, there aren't many panels that pop out. While the art is sufficient, it doesn't comprise a large part of the manga's appeal.

While SP Baby won't win points for realism, its heart is in the right place. The first volume indicates that these are merely the earliest stages of what's shaping up to be a fun romance. Romance readers will prove best suited to overlook this volume's flaws.

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Austin Price

Rating:

There's little to recommend SP Baby to the shojou neophyte, even less to recommend it to the genre's connoisseurs. Maki Enjōji's linework is so generic it could have been lifted from any number of similar titles and so staid and clean it feels like an antiseptic applied to these pages to stop anything livelier than dust growing on them. The paneling is a mess, applied with little sense of rhythm and direction, while the background work is so half-hearted it's as if these characters aren't conversing on city streets or in palatial mansions so much as in the void. This may be by design: in the few instances that Enjoji draws buildings and environments head-on they seem to lack any dimension or personality. SP Baby centers the family of Japan's prime minister, but beyond this detail almost nothing about the story suggests it happens anywhere on Earth. Certainly not the plot, and certainly not the characters.

In some ways, though, this is to the series' advantage. Because it shies away from trashier elements, it has to offer audiences something. The plot alone is too simple: the fantasy of a handsome member of the aristocracy falling head-over-heels for the beautiful but simple working-class woman is one of our oldest romantic fantasies. We were tired of it the first time we heard Cinderella. Enjoji at least is smart enough to realize this, and so goes in on a plot so daffy it borders on parody. Dashing Kagetaro Sugo isn't just the nephew of Japan's prime minister, plagued by daily assassination attempts (one might think that, as an extraneous a political figure, he'd be more useful to his attackers ransomed than murdered): he's also cursed with a rare genetic disorder that only allows him to feel when in Tamaki's presence. He's also constantly hinting at some woeful past connection to love-interest and new-bodyguard Tamaki that would turn her against him totally. She, for her part, is hopelessly smitten with Nasu, a character we barely see, so of course the two can't be upfront about their feelings and have instead to be pushed into inciting situations in the most contrived manner possible.

Hence why Sugo proposes that Tamaki become his bodyguard by throwing her into an unmarked van. And later tests her aptitude as a bodyguard by staging a hit-and-run. Hence why their first moment of real romantic chemistry can come only after they end up tripping over each other while concerned about a fish at the beach. Again, it's nothing new – romantic fantasies by definition demand something fantastic, and so why not indulge to the strangest possible limit if you can? -- but a certain derangement in Enoji's sensibility suggests that she is in on the joke at some level.

Unfortunately, certain other qualities suggests that on even deeper levels she doesn't care that it's a joke and buys into this fantasy. SP Baby possess an earnestness that's difficult to dismiss, a sincerity that of tone that limits the zany appeal of this series to those who already similarly appreciate its particular kind of wish fulfillment.

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Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Tamaki in SP Baby, Maki Enjōji's second title to get an English-language release, is not having a great life when the story begins. Although Enjoji doesn't give us all of the gritty details, we can infer from the story that she had to quit school after her parents died when she was a teenager in order to support her younger brother, and now that she's in her twenties, that's something she wants to continue to do so that he has the opportunities denied to her. That's why she ends up working for Kagetora Sugou, a handsome and wealthy young man who…wait, what does he do? Apparently he, too, exists to care for his family, albeit in a totally different way – his uncle is the PM of Japan, and Kagetora's job seems to be to be a political face or something, because we really don't see him do any work beyond a meeting and a party. That's a little annoying, but I suspect that it will turn out to be important down the line, because although Tamaki doesn't remember it, Kagetora insists that the two of them have met before, and if I were a betting woman, I'd put money on him somehow being involved in (or responsible for) the accident that killed Tamaki's parents.

That's actually what's so interesting about this volume – what Enjoji doesn't tell us. She never comes out and narrates that Tamaki has been supporting her brother; we have to infer it from what we are told and Tamaki's actions. Likewise, Kagetora's apparent inability to feel anything from physical contact (except when it's Tamaki, of course!) and his insistence that they've met but maybe he doesn't want her to remember has implications of the trauma of whatever accident killed the Hasegawas. The romance itself is cute, with Tamaki actively resisting Kagetora's advances (with mixed success) and Kagetora trying desperately to communicate that he likes her, but honestly the real attraction thus far is figuring out what we aren't being told. Both protagonists are likable and if Kagetora isn't good at listening to Tamaki when she says no, that's sadly par for the course with the romance genre. His weird homophobia, which is three times played for laughs, isn't great, but it also isn't as toxic as it could be and may just be (ham-handedly) intended to show how desperate he is for Tamaki to realize he likes her.

SP Baby is thus far avoiding some of the pitfalls Happy Marriage!? fell into in terms of a domineering male lead and shoujo trappings despite the adult characters. It isn't on the level of my favorite Enjoji series (Private Prince and Yoru Café, both available in French), but it has a lot of potential to get there.