Mullin has long admired Her Excellency Beelzebub from afar but now that he’s working with one of the great sovereigns of Pandemonium he’s in for a shock! Miss Beelzebub does as she pleases, loves fluffy things, and doesn’t seem like she can be the effective administrator that she is! It’s going to take a lot of work on Mullin’s part to keep his new employer on-track, focused, and not to let her get too focused on fluffies!
Like several other romcoms I’ve tackled recently, Miss Beelzebub is light on the jokes and heavy on the fluff, although this time this is true both symbolically and literally given that the fourth page of the first volume introduces the reader to Beelzebub as she lies, in the nude, surrounded by fluffy creatures made out of angels hair. This story does draw its general background from Christian theology, as many of the higher ranking characters are fallen angels with names that may be familiar to many readers.
But that is as far as any grounding, worldbuilding, or any explanatory commas venture in this series.
I can’t say that the characters are any more fleshed out than their setting sadly. Mangaka motoba seems to think that “reoccurring gags that involve a character” is the same thing as “giving a character actual character traits/depth” which is not the case. Out of the main cast, side character Azazel is probably the “most” fleshed out simply by having a more involved gag associated with him. Azazel is the big, strong, dark, and quiet character who Mullin quite admires but it turns out that Azazel loves cute things, cries easily, and his usual meal is quite adorable.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have Belphegor whose traditional pose has been replaced with a nervous bladder (I guess matoba was going for some kind of reverse “gap moe” since Belphegor appears as a moe loli but it’s hard to find her cute when she’s running off on practically every other page). We also have Eurynome who is a literal shotacon and as far as I can tell, the mythological Eurynome who matoba is probably referencing has nothing to do with “unhealthy obsessions with young boys.”
Not only are the characters and general plot of the story dull, frankly the art isn’t very interesting either. At first the story was set up like a four-panel comic — each page was it’s own, self-contained gag within the larger gags of the chapter — but then later on matoba switches to having more traditionally laid out comic pages, before going back to four-panel pages. I am a big believer that the story being told should match the format it is being told in. In a traditional book this might mean more inner dialogue, for a live action movie the way the action and the shots flow, and in a cartoon the way the art is exaggerated or subdued to match the emotional mood. In comics, I believe that the layout of pages (including such things as spreads or the basics of paneling) should work in conjunction with the story, but here it just feels like matoba is being lazy! They’ll have a more complicated page when they have the idea for it but otherwise they’ll just go with a formulaic, paste-in-the-template style of “four panels=one gag” and it felt like they weren’t even taking their own story seriously!
There truly is no reason for me to recommend this series and I will not be looking forward to the upcoming anime either.