Servant X Service, Volume 1

The quotidian details of government work are the stuff of comedy in this charming manga that looks at office life. Hasebe, Miyoshi, and Yamagami are civil servants new to the Health and Welfare Department, where they must field the complaints and queries of a churlish public. Despite highfalutin schoolgirls, rambling grandmothers, and distracted temp workers, they find camaraderie between the endless stacks of paperwork%E2%80%94and even some genuinely heartfelt emotion. In this collection of "4 koma" (or four-panel) strips, the brief, breezy nature of the story is its greatest strength, but also its greatest weakness: the stakes are as low as possible, and some might find the light humor to be unstimulating. Still, this is a largely delightful look at the joy to be found in even the most mundane of work, and a paean to the ties that bind coworkers. (Apr.)