New Manga First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about the first chapter or so of a new manga.
If you’re a digital artist working through the online content grind, having some kind of identifiable thing that’s distinctly your own is a huge help. For a lot of artists, it ends up being fanart; people become known for doing art of one particular character or many characters from one particular property, and gain a fanbase from there. But there are other paths, and one of the less-traveled is to simply make gorgeous art with some kind of gimmick that serves as a draw. Enter suzushiro333, a Twitter illustrator better known as “that person who draws all those maids skateboarding.” They have been at this for years, and they have gotten very good at it. Good enough to make Maid to Skate, a manga that is undeniably one of a kind.
There is an admirable, almost battle shonen-esque laser focus on the titular subject here. We don’t really learn much about our protagonist, Benihana—whose name, by the way, is a skateboard trick—over the course of these short few pages. We don’t learn a ton about her situation either, such as why she seems to live in some kind of group home with a bunch of other maids. We do learn one very important thing though; in this world, maids skate. Maids skate a lot. Maids take skating very seriously. Maids skating is the entire point of this manga, to an even greater degree than most actual hobbyist manga I’ve seen. And if you don’t like maids that skate? Get out. There is nothing for you here.
It’s honestly not surprising that Maid to Skate is so focused on the actual action of maids skating. Most of this first chapter is a single long action sequence wherein Benihana tries to skate through town to get to a market quickly, and it is absolutely gorgeous; sleek, refined, and with a command of lines-of-movement that even the best working mangaka would have to respect. The entire debut chapter is basically a Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 level, and reading it is as fun as playing through one yourself. It knows better than to stick too strictly to plausibility, too. There’s an absolutely great bit in here where Beni retrieves a crying little girl’s balloon by ramping off of a building to snatch it out of the sky.
And to provide a counterpoint to that, she also absolutely eats it while trying to jump the gap over a river (!!). This level of completely bailing is apparently unacceptable for a maid, since she ends the chapter being scolded by the presumable head of her group home.
This does lead me to wonder, though; where does Maid to Skate go from here, if anywhere? Certainly, no one would complain if every chapter was basically just a spin on this. At the same time, I wonder about this delightful little world and the people that live in it, and would be over the moon to learn more about skater maid society. Wouldn’t you?
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