Going only by surface impressions, at first I didn’t think I’d like Fairy Tail.  Boy, was I wrong.  Hiro Mashima’s magical adventure quickly turned out to be one of the most purely enjoyable manga I’ve ever read.  In fact, it’s a good thing Del Rey decided to publish volumes one and two simultaneously; I’d have been sorely disappointed if I’d been made to wait for the second one.

I’ll admit it, most of the time I get anxious when I see world construction occurring on a grand scale.  That’s true especially in the context of magic, which often seems to give creators license to make up the rules as they go along.  “All right,” I’ll think to myself, “this may become dramatically coherent by the sixteenth volume, but am I really going to stick around that long?”

Fortunately, none of those concerns are warranted here.  In Fairy Tale, Mashima does the job of a master fantasy novelist—building his world in a way that dovetails with the forward flow of the narrative.  Sure, you’ll get the occasional info-dump word balloon, but even that’s acceptable because we explore this world largely through the eyes of a fledging wizard named Lucy.  Other characters do need to explain stuff to her, but the information and backstories provided always seem vaguely intuitive and unforced.  More importantly, such passages never really slow down this uptempo, infectiously fun romp through both the mythic and the horrific.

Yes, the word “wizard” put me on edge initially, too.  But Mashima’s take on wizardry is refreshingly real-world and grown-up.  By that I don’t mean that Fairy Tail is gritty and realistic.  It’s actually incessantly silly, and it’s that silliness that made me laugh out loud more than I recall ever having done with manga.  I just mean that we don’t get a sub-Harry Potterish world that’s crossbred with Japanese pop culture’s fascination with kids in school uniforms.  The other protagonist here, the dragon-like Natsu, is definitely adolescent in temperament.  However, the basic device that springboards his and Lucy’s adventures is the particular wizards “guild” from which the series takes its title.  In short, the presence of this institution elevates the tone well above the bubblegum level.  Through “Fairy Tail” the two heroes find work assignments that are posted on a board much like one might find on a college campus.  The episodic structure of these first two volumes, then, doesn’t resemble that of a sprawling epic, but rather a gun-for-hire pulp story, or even something like The X-Files, as there’s a pronounced element of mystery throughout.

Mashima’s sensibility here is fairly close to the one on display in his perennially popular Rave Master, but the art is more sophisticated and his wild imagination seems more focused.  (By the way, Rave Master’s conical-nosed and impossibly cute character, Plue, is also on hand here.)  As an artist, Mashima packs a lot into his compositions but still keeps things looking clean.  As a writer, he takes stock types (no matter the circumstances, Natsu’s six-pack and Lucy’s cleavage are always on display) and makes them both endearing and emotionally real.  To be sure, Fairy Tail has a lot of whimsical touches, but Mashima doesn’t mash your face in them; rather, they’re lurking in the corners of the panels, in the sound effects and backgrounds.

Don’t get me wrong—when the action starts, it really zings.  When reading these scenes (I want to say “experiencing” them), I felt like I was watching a live-action martial arts movie—or a really exciting anime—and reading a topflight superhero comic at the same time.  And this despite Mashima’s occasional practice of having exposition take place in the heat of battle, which I usually can’t stand.