(Review is for the full series -- it starts slowly but gets better)

It's hard to know what to say about a series that features over two dozen compelling, memorable characters while also showing most of those characters in their underwear.

There's no getting around it: Negima!, a manga series about a ten-year-old boy wizard (Negi) who teaches English and magic to a class of Japanese high-schoolers, contains ridiculous amounts of fanservice --- that is, underage girls (with adult proportions) swimming in pools, getting their clothes blown off by gusts of wind, and so on. (Negi is also PG-13 naked for a few panels in many of the early chapters.)

This makes it really hard to recommend. But if you ignore/flip past the fanservice, you'll find one of the greatest stories ever told in cartoon form. Despite starting with a few stumbling chapters of high-school misadventure, Negima! soon embarks on a series of epic quests, filled with clever writing and character development and interesting combat scenes and difficult moral decisions. (After one chapter-long debate between a hero and a villain, I spent a few minutes just staring off into space, trying to figure out whose side I was on --- and I couldn't decide, which is a rare thing indeed.)

I could rant about the virtues of the series for pages. Nearly every girl in Negi's class of thirty has her own arc, chock-full of meaningful character development. The "villains" are complex characters with worthy motives, who in some cases may be doing more good than the heroes. The non-magical characters react with appropriate confusion to the strangeness of their world. The jokes are hilarious. There's a chaste, adorable lesbian romance. There's this panel, which sums up my entire worldview:




And the fanservice almost ruins the whole thing. It's more the fault of the manga business than the author --- he makes plenty of self-mocking jokes about his obligation to feature half-naked characters. Still, it's completely understandable if you decide never to pick this up.