to continue my bias: I also heard that the first couple of volumes were loaded with fanservice because the sponsor? wanted to sell the fanservice even though he wanted to make shounen adventure. Lucky for us, later on they let him make what he wants. Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother following it. Fanservice can only carry you so far before it gets really boring.

Which is fine, until you get to the live action version. I rather like it, in a typical Japanese drama way (you know what I mean), but when the creative team feel they need to add manga-style fanservice… bloody hell. I turned the last episode off after five minutes because a load of schoolgirls in bikinis looking vaguely uncomfortable is not the stuff good drama is made of. Even J-drama. :)

Like you i found the entire concept of a 10 year old kid getting nekkid with 31 girls a bit on the creepy side. And on more than a few occassions that creep factor would go through the roof in certain situations.

The excessive fanservice ruins it aswell for me. A series shouldn’t rely on it’s fanservice, and to often thats the impression i get, that he’s trying to use fanservice to keep people reading.

I wouldn’t say Akamatsu’s art has always been his strong point (though if you compare it to his plot and story flow, then i supose it could be lol). But the art of Negima is really good, but there are to many parallels between AI Love You, Always my Sanata and Love Hina for me.

It’s not a bad series, but it’s not one that i would actively go out and look for to buy. For series like this i usually wait until Waterstones have a 3 for 2 offer on, then pick up a volume as my 3rd book, so it dosent cost me anything lol.

Other than that, good review, as always :)
I started reading Negima, thought I stopped just after Negi and Evangeline had their battle. I just stopped.

Then after watching the first anime series I thought: no, I´m not going back. Then Shaft picked it up and that made the series much better, except for the usual Shaft randomness…

The characters are great, the design and whatnot are really intresting to see and all. I don´t get any creepy feelings when girls want to have fun with younger boys… it just doesn´t faze me anymore, I don´t think most of the stuff does, it just get boring really really fast.

Since I don´t have any siblings I have quite a troublesome time leeching of them :p espacially the way anime/manga is treated around here…

Mahou Sensei Negima can pretty much be nick-named “Harem Potter”. But still, i like this series a lot. Very funny. :p