Both seem true of Maid to Skate, a new manga from one-name artist Suzushiro, which Viz Media released in December of last year (although I wasn't made aware of it until Tegan O'Neil covered it for TCJ a few months back).
Indeed, the title and the cover tell you all you need to know about the book. It's about skateboarding maids.
According to the little author bio at the end, it started as illustrations that went viral on social media, eventually leading to comics, and the simplicity of those comics certainly seems to comport with the straightforward origin of the project. The five chapters in the first volume are short, standalone, quite uncomplicated stories.
The book seems set in some alternate time or universe, perhaps a pre-industrial European city, one that is devoid of modern fashions and technology and its streets free of cars (and, now that I think of it, horses and carriages too). It reminded me a bit of the setting of Disney's Beauty and the Beast.
The one exception to the vague old timey-ness of the setting is, of course, the skateboard, which seems to be perfectly modern...or at least up to date with the skateboarding technology of the late '90s, which was the last time I was at all engaged in skating in any way, shape or form.
For reasons never made explicit here, skating seems to be associated with maids. All of those who live and work in a particular mansion are also all expert skaters, anyway.
In the first story, we meet our heroine Benihana, a late riser who we watch climb out of bed and dramatically dress in her maid uniform, a look of determination on her face and a "KA-SHIIING" sound effect as she puts on the headpiece bit, a motion accompanied by action lines. (Despite the mention of "bed" and getting dressed, this isn't a terribly horny manga...not unless you have a thing for maid uniforms, I guess; O'Neil's review says the opposite, but I'm referring strictly to nudity and gaze here, not necessarily the spirit of things.)
Benihana is sent to get more groceries, for which she changes out of her fancy maid shoes, which go KLK KLK KLK on the stairs, into tennis shoes, and grabs her board. We then get our first skating scene, and it's great, as Benihana and her board race through the streets, performing amazing, skate video-worthy tricks as she goes, like rail slides.
When a little girl she passes loses her balloon, Benihana resolves to retrieve it, even though it seems to require her literally flying to do so. She speeds towards a building, launches herself off its curved, ramp-like foundation onto the roof, and then again launches herself off a gable, soaring over the rooftops to reach the balloon ("Look! In the sky! A maid is flying!" a bystander remarks). The adventure is not over, though; determined to save time on her errand after this side quest delays her, Benihana attempts to jump a river on her board, but her shoelace snaps halfway across it, her shoe falls off and she plunges into the water.
In the next story, her fellow maid, dark-skinned, short-haired Iris, takes her to a skate shop for a new pair of shoes and a new board; above the shop, the proprietress has a huge half-pipe. Here, we learn a bit about skateboards, as Iris, disappointed in Benihana's building of her board based on the principles of what looks cutest, builds her a proper board.
The next story? An even more simple one introducing two more maids, and the four of them spend the allotted page count skating together, comparing and contrasting their skating styles (and, to a much lesser degree, their personalities and even bodies).
That's followed by a chapter that is more maid than skate, as the same foursome get in trouble for doing skate tricks in the house, and are assigned to cook dinner together, despite their vastly different levels of cooking skills and tastes and styles.
Finally, Benihana is in town again and ends up chasing a stray kitten who has stolen a fish, which, as in the first chapter, involves racing around the town performing various tricks, some of which you're more likely to see in Tony Hawk video games than anywhere else. These all build to a spectacular climax.
I'm neither an expert on maids or skating but feel more comfortable with the latter than the former. Suzushiro certainly captures the look, the poses and the action of skating, and the various sound effects in the English translation all sound absolutely perfect to me; I could hear the scrape of a board on a rail, the trucks hitting cement after a jump and the whizz of the wheels as they glide over cement.
It's all masterfully done, enough so that I think the book should prove appealing even to readers who don't share Suzushiro's interest in, as the bio says, "maids, skateboarding, and maids on skateboards."
In addition to the stories, most of them are followed by one-page "Iris's Skateboard Corner" features, wherein Iris explains stuff like the components of a board and how to build one, various skateboard tricks and stances.
At the end of the book, following a two-page spread featuring the four main maids we've met in modern street clothes with their boards, there's also a series of four full-color pin-ups, in which Benihana explains that "The more you fall, the better you get at skateboarding! But sometimes you trip oover a short step or an itty-bitty pebble and end up super embarrassed, right?" She then shares three different strategies with how to deal with a fall.
In terms of the style and precise focus, Maid to Skate is quite different from Brandon Dumais and AJ Dungo's Skating Wilder (which I reviewed here), but both share one thing in common: They are both involving, inspiring celebrations of skateboarding, one part paean and one part introduction.
If you want to check the book out immediately, it looks like the first three chapters are available online here.
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