The reason why I started reading Negima can be summarized in two words: Ken Akamatsu. The guy who wrote my all-time favorite Manga “Love Hina”, Ken Akamatsu, is back as the author of a still running (since 2002!) fantasy series involving a 10 years old english teacher of an all-girls middle school, who is actually a mage-in-training. Ken Akamatsu is the only one I know of who can make a this weird plot make a jack of sense.

Negi Springfield is a 10 years old mage, newly graduated from a magic school. He hopes to become a great mage to search for his father, the Thousand Master – one of the most powerful mages who ever lived, and he’s so mysterious so that no one even knows where the Thousand in his nickname stands for, and who has a seriously weird sense of humor. Instead, he is appointed as the new english teacher of an all-girls middle school, and the homeroom teacher of class 2-A.

This could have turned out to some kind of slice of life series, or a sick harem series due to the 10 years old main character. Instead, it’s a great fantasy-comedy that picks the best out of all it’s genres.

Just like Love Hina, Negima’s main strength lies in it’s characters. 3-A consists mostly of weird people – Some examples are a Robot(whom no one seems to notice is a robot despite the highly visible joints on her knees and her antennas), an immortal 10 years old vampire who uses an illusion to look older, an anonymous web celebrity, a ninja, a ghost, a mad scientist and a girl obsessed with all kinds of exploration. Ken also reused a lot of the character designs from Love Hina, Nodoka is Shinobu(Yay!) with longer bangs and who uses a book that reads minds, Asuna is Naru with bells in her hair and uses a giant folding fan that works like Touma’s Imagine Breaker ability in Toaru Majutsu no Index(apparently it can become a huge sword too) and Sakurazaki has Motoko’s personality and even uses the same Shinmeryuu skillset as she did(the main character almost getting his head chopped off by a Zanganken attack, sounds familiar?) with Angel Wings she normally keeps hidden(I love Angel Wings!), Ku-Fei is my favorite character Kaolla Su but a lot less silly(not good) and her obsession with huge guns put onto another character, etc. Almost all of these girls also somehow gets pulled into the magic world, some by accident, some due to a certain obsession with exploration, some were already there and some came by their own choice. The so far most notable character outside of the class is Kamo, the talking ferret who “organizes” most Pacts, has a tendency to pull cigarrettes out of nowhere pretty often and who fled his land to escape being sued for 2000 counts of stealing underwear. With a main cast consisting of over 35-40 characters, do I need to mention there are a lot of names? Fortunately, this isn’t that hard since there are a lot of character-focused chapters/chapters told from someone else’s viewpoint, Profiles, and they introduce one character at a time so it doesn’t feel like you are drowning in names. Most of these characters also has their own unique personalities and backstories, and it doesn’t feel like a class full of nameless nobodies. It’s not as well as Fairy Tail, though, where all the over 100 clan members had some kind of personality. But Fairy Tail is an exception, and Negima’s cast feels more living than most Animes and Mangas ever made.

You are constantly picking up tons of references to Love Hina, but also to several other series such as Clannad. I already mentioned the character designs, but there are also a visit to Kyoto where both Motoko in Love Hina and Sakurazaki trained for example. Ken Akamatsu also wrote himself that Nodoka was based on Shinobu on the cover of the first volume.

There is a bit of fanservice/ecchi in here as well, but unlike parts of Love Hina, Negima knows where the line between acceptable and tasteless goes. There are underwear showing a lot, and an occasional butt, but no more than that. The ecchi is a quite a lot less than Love Hina, generally just sightly more than The Familiar of Zero. Just like Love Hina, there are a lot of jokes centering around personality clashes and people not taking each others seriously or making fun of each others, mixed in with a bit of slapstick making a really nice mix that never feels repetitive despite many jokes are used numerous times. The action scenes in here are also more over-the-top than even those towards the end of Love Hina, but still not like Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou where you in some episodes(EP10 for example) had to really put some effort into finding anything not extremely over-the-top and/or overkill. There are several enemies that turns into allies(Evangeline and Koutarou so far), but they don’t make the mistake of putting extremely powerful villains on the good party like for example Dragonball does, but they down-power them significantly similarily to how Soul Eater does when Crona joins, by shrinking down Ragnarok from 3 meters tall to 30 cm. Evangeline who is at just a few percent of her full power due to a curse and Koutarou who lost his ability to use Wolf Spirits and his transformation. This also helps saving from the feeling that they’re just piling more and more powerful villains after each others, since that tend to make the story disappear, again like Dragonball. So far Negima’s story quality has just been getting better and better, as expected of Ken.

You can read the so far 291 chapters that has been released(it’s still in production with a new chapter every week, each chapter being about 20 pages) here, as well as getting an RSS feed that notifies you each time a new chapter is released. In order to get all the references, you should also have read Love Hina here, but it’s just heavily recommended – even if you don’t want to get all the references, it’s a really good Manga – the Anime wasn’t anywhere near though so if you only watch that you can’t expect to get all the references. Currently it is about to get a 10/10 rating from me, and I sure hope it doesn’t drop that score anytime soon.

(Extra Comment: Come on, Nodoka! Get Negi and avenge Shinobu’s broken heart from Love Hina!)

Some screenshots are sightly edited to remove unnecessary content
(such as overlapping boxes and talk bubbles) and focus on the actual content

Screenshots taken using an iPhone 3GS, so they are fairly small