NEAR MYTHS: THE WORLD GOD ONLY KNOWS PT. 1 (2008)

Since there are over 200 installments of the 2008-2014 manga series THE WORLD GOD ONLY KNOWS, and I've only read the first 20 or so, it's too early for me to tell if any episodes will have the qualities I seek in a mythcomic. However, at least the early stories have some engaging myth-elements.

WORLD follows one of the most popular tropes in manga: "cute magical teen girl involves ordinary teen boy in all sorts of trouble." This simple formula may make the guy the eternal goat, as with Ataru in URUSEI YATSURA...

...but he may step up and take on heroic proportions, like Tenchi in at least some episodes of TENCHI MUYO...

....Or he may just be part of an outright guy-girl romance, like VIDEO GIRL AI.

WORLD's viewpoint character, Keima Katsuragi, is a nerd like the fellow in VIDEO GIRL AI. Such subtypes are often known for retreating from the real world into video games, comic books, cosplay and other such activities, and the magical girl's intrusion forces him to cope with reality, up to and including getting to know real girls. Keima is a video-game addict, but of a particular subsection: that of "dating-sims." Keima has an unblemished record in terms of seducing sim-girls because of his uncanny comprehension of the programming practices. Keima has absolutely no interest in girls in the real world, who are too unpredictable for his taste.

However, this self-styled "god of conquest" is selected for a perilous mission by the Powers of Hell, and they send their representative-- a cute ditz named Elsee-- to make him sign a contract. Elsee succeeds in this task only because Keima doesn't believe in Hell, and belatedly learns that if he doesn't help this doofus from perdition, his head will get blown off his shoulders.

What seems, at this early point, to separate Keima from the average dopey teen-boy is that he has a samurai-like devotion to his pursuit of fictional sim-girls. Elsee's intrusion on his life forces Keima to use his faux dating skills to approach real girls at his school; girls who have become unwitting receptacles for Hell's escaped spirits. Keima doesn't have to seduce the girls so much as "fill the gap within their hearts," which will expel the spirits so that Elsee can re-capture them. Thus this thoroughly monastic game-player now has to figure out strategies to resolve the hidden conflicts of young feminine hearts, thus giving them epiphanies enabling them to live their lives better. The only saving-grace of this undesirable situation is that once Keima works his dating-magic on each subject, each subject forgets all about her interactions with Keima, though implicitly the psychic lesson remains intact on a subconscious level. (For instance, a tough karate-girl abjures soft things, but secretly wants to indulge in her feminine liking for softness: Keima helps her reconcile her psychological dichotomy.)

Keima's monomaniacal devotion to dating-sims is of course endlessly comic, and it's almost a given that at some point some female, most likely his daffy co-star Elsee, will persuade him of the virtues of reality. But creator Tamiki Wakaki has at least arranged the elements of this very over-familiar trope in some relatively new ways.