For the first time in a long time today, I stopped off at my local B&N (that's "Barnes and Noble" for the non-texting crowd). There wasn't a lot of new stuff there, but I did pick up the first volume of a very strange new series. It's called Nurse Hitomi's Monster Infirmary.
Our protagonist is the clumsy cyclops prominently pictured above, the titular Nurse Hitomi. In a world that starts out looking an awful lot like ours, several students at a local high school have been going through strange new changes as a result of puberty. Our first story introduces us to a girl whose tongue has grown to, like, three feet long.
And it only gets weirder from there.
In the first volume alone, we are introduced to Tongue Girl, an immortal zombie, two girls who are alternately growing and shrinking respectively (dramatically reversing their former size dynamic) and one girl who is turning invisible.
As the story moves onward, we gradually see that there are more and more monster-like girls in this world, walking the streets just like ordinary people like you and me. (Apparently, they are just accepted and everyone lives in peace. No fantastic racism here...yet.) That makes this series a lot like A Centaur's Life or Monster Musume.
The former was a mite bit boring for my tastes, the latter too heavy on fanservice at the expense of the plot. Thankfully, Nurse Hitomi's Monster Infirmary suffers from neither of these problems. (Although they do mention that the growing and shrinking friends are both growing and shrinking out of their clothes, so the potential for future fanservice is definitely there. And the other girl's invisibility is pretty sporadic, so she sometimes only makes her clothes invisible. But all this is nowhere near enough to derail or detract from the plot.)
That being said, the art style is a little on the weird side, and the fall-apart zombie girl's body separation is a very odd mix of the comical and the surreal, maybe a hair or two creepier than the separation powers of Trafalgar Law or Buggy the Clown from One Piece.
I'm not really one for monster girls, or girls with monstrous bodies or abilities. Some green chicks like Gamora or Elphaba from Wicked aren't bad, but that's about it. Wings, hooves, tails...all of them instantly kill any sexual interest I might have had. That's why I never got into Leela from Futurama.
The stories it tells aren't bad, though: friends dealing with a bizarre new inverted size relationship, learning about self-confidence after turning invisible, dealing with recklessness, learning to love oneself warts and all. Basic school guidance counselor stuff, but with monster girls.
It's a weird series with weird art, long story short. But we shall see if it gets any easier or any more interesting as the series goes on. I'm not against it, not by a long shot. Go pick up a copy and decide for yourself if it's worth it.
