Black Butler Volume 1

The current passion for maid manga has spawned the related trend of butler manga, regendering the same basic fantasy of attractive, obliging servants in classy yet fetishistic dress.

Black Butler gives us the supremely competent butler Sebastian, his young master, the Earl of Phantomhive, and, thankfully, a sly sense of humor about the silliness of the whole thing. Volume One ends on a twist that may take the story in more interesting directions.

The Phantomhive estate, ostensibly somewhere in England, is an odd place. Earl Ciel Phantomhive, the head of the household, is a twelve-year-old boy with an eyepatch who runs a toy company. His faithful butler, Sebastian, is unflappable, obsequious, and hyper-competent at everything from baking a gourmet pastry to dancing a waltz to defeating a Chinese martial-arts master in combat.

Everyone else on the staff—the perky gardener, the macho cook, the nearsighted maid—is utterly useless at his or her job, but Sebastian is almost supernaturally capable of stepping in to salvage the mess. And so, with the help of many cups of tea, the young Earl and his household while away their very proper days.

For most of the first volume, that’s all that happens in Black Butler: minor domestic disturbances, each resolved by Sebastian’s inimitable skill. Not until the final chapters does the Phantomhive household begin to show its sinister underbelly, as it’s revealed that, yes, there is indeed more to the butler than meets the eye.

For the most part, however, the characters busy themselves with dinner parties, dancing lessons, troublesome guests, and other trifling concerns of the titled class, all set in a Gothic fantasy of Edwardian Britain. It’s a sort of manga-fied cross between Gormenghast and Carry On, Jeeves.

This material would be more tedious than it is were it not for the manga’s lightly wicked, tongue-in-cheek tone: Sebastian is always just a little too perfect, the Earl is just a little too proper, and everyone else is outright ridiculous. It’s not as broad a parody as, say, Hayate the Combat Butler, but Yana Toboso is clearly amused by the starchy English setting, the Wodehousian ideal of the overqualified manservant, and, inevitably, the homoerotic undertones of the handsome, obedient Sebastian’s relationship with his frail-looking young master.

The Yen Press translation classes up the dialogue appropriately. “Permit me to teach you the Viennese waltz,” says Sebastian at one point, “as I have often visited Schönbrunn Palace in the past.” Try saying that with a straight face.

Toboso’s sexy, gothic-tinged art is generally worthy of the material, although the character designs are all over the place: the comedy-relief servants don’t look like they belong in the same universe as the bishonen Sebastian. Upper-class trappings like chandeliers, vintage cars, and fancy desserts (one per chapter) are rendered with care.

Shaenon Garrity is a manga editor, writer and comics creator. She is the author of CLAMP in America, and the creator of Narbonic.

Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.