A.I. Love you || Ken Akamatsu

A.I. Love You - Introduction

Note: This is an original editors' note from the first volume.

Before Love Hina, Ken Akamatsu had single-handedly put himself on the map with the very series you now hold in your hands, A.I. Love You. In 1993, Akamatsu-sensei won the '50th Shonen Magazine Newcomer's Award' for his work "Hito Natsu no KIDS Game" (roughly translated as "A Kid's Game for One Summer") and, as a follow-up, he drew upon his love for computers and conceived a series that is in essence the manga equivalent of the John Hughes classic Weird Science mixed with all the character stylings that would later make Love Hina so unforgettable.

A.I. Love You, or A.I. Ga Tomaranai as it is known in Japan, began its run in 1994 as a part of the Weekly Shonen Magazine line-up and later moved to the monthly Shonen Magazine Special before concluding in 1999. All 55 chapters were originally collected across a series of nine tankoubons (collected editions), but with the overnight success of Love Hina, Kodansha re-issued A.I. Ga Tomaranai as an eight-volume "new series" release (Which is the version you are reading). Compared to the originals, the re-issued volumes have a higher page count, brand-new covers and new bonus materials added into each volume. For those keeping track, Love Hina was also granted a similar re-release in the form of the semi-colored "Iro-Hina" release.

Still, the first thing that you'll probably notice about A.I. Love You is how different the art looks from that seen in Love Hina. Much like the transition Kosuke Fujishima went through with Oh My Goddess!, it took Ken Akamatsu quite some time to be able to truly make his artwork shine. The first volume of A.I. Love You doesn't look completely like the eighth volume. Nor does the first volume of Love Hina look like the fourteenth. His artwork has come a long way since he first began and its always fun to compare his old stuff with his more recent works like Magister Negi Magi and the anime Mao-chan.

Artwork aside, I'd like you to take a moment and try to forget all you know about computers. This is a work of fiction set and written in the mid-90s, a time when it was unrealistic for anyone to have a CD-burner, much less high speed internet. This is a work of fiction after all, and if Akamatsu-sensei saw fit to have a fully-rendered A.I. program running on a computer with barely a gigabyte worth of memory, who are we to judge? It sure makes for some entertaining reading.

So find a nice cozy little place to curl up and read to your heart's content. But, please, don't bind the spine. You don't want to ruin the collector's value now do you?

- Adam Arnold, October 2003

P.S. Next time you are watching the Love Hina anime, make sure you keep an eye out for the A.I. Love You cameos!