Hoshin Engi, by Fujisaki Ryu

Hahaha, I love this manga.

Houshin Engi is a shounen manga based loosely on the Chinese novel The Creation of the Gods. Dakki, a powerful fox demon, has enchanted the Yin emperor Chuu-oh and is destroying the empire by means of her peculiarly high-spirited atrocities - cheerily throwing huge crowds of people into pits of snakes, making excitable cooking shows in which she feeds people to their parents, etc. She's just having so much fun! Sadly, the immortal sennin of the Kongrong Mountains don't appreciate the mess she's making of China, so they send a sennin-in-training named Taikobo to defeat Dakki and her followers.

You know that thing about shounen manga, where the hero is pretty much the strongest guy around by the end of volume five or so? That doesn't happen here. Taikobo is genuinely not very good at fighting, and usually achieves his goals by getting people drunk or getting them mad at him. (He's really good at getting people mad at him.) The fighting he mainly pushes off on the stronger allies he makes throughout the series; he's mostly a stategist rather than a combatant.

There's a scene late in the series where his team is getting beaten up, and one of them insists that he help, only to find that he's passed out from the strain of an earlier, more minor fight; another character points out, reasonably, "He's never really been all that good, you know." This manga ran in Shounen Jump from 1996 to 2000, and I'm pretty sure that the magazine no longer permits this sort of behavior. (He's obliged to get some power-ups for the Final Battle, which I found disappointing.)

Dakki is an extremely enjoyable villainess, and she always remains a threat, and more powerful than Taikobo. This is refreshing, given that characters like her have a habit of being shown up by male villains at some point. Doesn't happen here! However, like Taikobo, Dakki doesn't go in much for physical force, meaning that she doesn't get many traditional fight scenes. She prefers to get things done by manipulating the people around her. It becomes clear pretty quickly that she commits her worst crimes not for their own sake, but for the outrage they engender in Taikobo and the other protagonists. Their hatred is a tool she's using to achieve another goal. (Though she does seem to enjoy watching people get mad at her.)

Though the series has a lot of dark moments - a big chunk of the cast is dead by the end - it's consistently funny even during the finale. A lot of the humor is self-referential; the characters all know that they're in a manga. Taikobo at point wins a fight by transferring himself and his opponent into a 4-panel newspaper comic, and Dakki complains that the plot of the anime diverges too far from the manga. Another guy, defeating Taikobo, temporarily turns the series into an earnest high-school sports comic.

The most powerful Sennin the world, an evil clown named Shinkoyo who declines to take sides in the central dispute, evidently derives his power from the fact that he has read the script. He's constantly feeding information to both Taikobo and Dakki, "to keep things interesting," and provokes fights between their forces when things slow down. When Taikobo and company are gearing up for the final battle, Fujisaki has failed to provide a reason for Taikobo's lazy mentor Roushi to get himself over there - so Shinkoyo kidnaps him, on the grounds that it just wouldn't look right if he missed the finale.

Various other notable things about this manga:

* There's no heterosexual romance. The only non-comic-relief and non-immediately-doomed male-female relationships are parent-child ones, and the one that gets the most page-time is abusive. What's up with that, Fujisaki.

* Dudes do stare soulfully into each other's eyes a lot, though.

* There's a huge cast of characters, but they're nearly all guys; I think there are maybe ten named women, and probably seventy guys. Here, I'll try to list all the women: Dakki, Kibi, Kijin, Chuu-oh's first wife, Nataku's mom, Sengyoku, Ryukitsu Koushu, Hekiun, Hekiun's sister, Supumama, Ko Hiko's wife and sister, Venus, Queen, Madonna, one of Otenkun's subordinates, Yuukyou, Jyoka. Okay, I'm wrong, that's eighteen - but I just found a character guide and counted the names, and it looks like there are about a hundred and thirty characters total. Also, two of the women I listed have no dialog, two more die in the chapter they're introduced in, and another is already dead the first time we see her.

* Taikobo's second-in-command Youzen looks suspiciously similar to Kurama from YuYu Hakusho. Nataku (you knew some version of Nataku was going to be in this comic) looks and acts kinda like Hiei.

* Taikobo rides around on a timid talking hippo named Supushan, who has a Supupapa and Supumama and comes from Supu Valley. How the Moomin family ended up in feudal China is not clear.

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