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Quick, what’s 5 feet tall, weighs 98 pounds, and has a really bad attitude? (No, it’s not my editor…he’s taller than that.) It’s Serenity Harper, the pint-sized protagonist of the first inspirational manga from the folks at RealBuzz studios. Serenity Harper is the main character of Serenity: Bad Girl in Town. Serenity just moved from Los Angeles, comes from a broken home, nurses a “lone wolf” complex, and uses enough curse words to make a sailor blush. No doubt about it, this girl needs help. That help comes in the form of the school’s “Prayer Club.” The Prayer Club is a small group of clean-cut Christian youngsters that have made a pledge to look out for Serenity and show her the glory of letting God into her life. Does that sound a little heavy-handed? Well, as it turns out, it is. And that was the major problem that I found with this otherwise okay manga.

Allow me to explain. Serenity is an incredibly target-specific manga. It is one of the first mangas made specifically for Christian girls between the ages 10 and 14. Like a really fast roller coaster at an amusement park, Serenity needs a sign and a meter that says, “You must be this young, this female, and this Christian to ride.” However, Serenity does make a decent showing for the group for which it was intended. Though Serenity is a, “little bundle of attitude, anger, and animosity,” she is a fairly likeable character. Most of the characters in the manga seem realistic. Serenity and the kids in the Prayer Club have genuine teenage reactions to everything they encounter. And I was pleasantly surprised to see that volume one of Serenity even finds the members of the Prayer Club dealing with their own, albeit smaller issues. Parts of the manga are genuinely funny. Serenity Harper has just enough attitude to keep readers on their toes.

However, through much of Serenity it feels like they are trying so hard to be “hip” that they overshoot their mark and wind up sounding cheesy and contrived. For instance, upon seeing Serenity for the first time, Derek, a member of the Prayer Club, remarks, “Scope the new tassel with blue hair.” (10 points to the first person to e-mail me with a plausible definition of the word “tassel” as it is being used here.) The same character is later quoted as saying, “Dawgz, we been DISSED.” The dated slang and the Christian rhetoric came together to make parts of this manga hard to enjoy. What should have been just a manga with a message wound up feeling more like propaganda. In volume one, Serenity meets a feminist teacher at her high school who shows her dislike for a male teacher by saying, “He mustn’t impose obsolete patriarchal Judeo-Christian values on young womyn.” Her spelling of the word “women” is important here because it is a spelling some have popularized as a way to spell “women” without using the word “men.” This same teacher is responsible for giving Serenity condoms later in the manga.

While Serenity does attempt to tackle some hard issues, the answer to every question big or small ends up being, not surprisingly, God. But, my real problem is that the manga goes to such great lengths to illustrate that Serenity leads a sad life and is in great need of help. And while it is true that she might want some guidance on big things like her parents’ divorce, does the fact that she eats sugary cereal and listens to heavy metal music really make her a troubled individual? The folks at RealBuzz studio make it a point to show Serenity eating what they call, “brightly colored sugar junk” and listening to her favorite band, The Angry Dead on their “Suffer and Die” tour.

I was disappointed at the open disapproval this manga projected onto any life style or ideology different from its’ own. However, all things considered, the crowd for which this manga is intended will probably find Serenity to be an enjoyable read. If you are young enough, female enough, and Christian enough to climb aboard, then you will enjoy watching Serenity’s exploits as she traverses the difficult road from “bad girl” to “better girl.” Give her a break, it’s only volume one!

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