Jason Bradley Thompson
September 8, 2016 
“Be ready to work yourselves to the bone as the public’s dogs!!” That’s how new employees are greeted at the Health & Welfare Department, where patient bureaucrats sit behind windows answering the public’s questions and telling people how to fill out forms. Into this public servant life come three new hires: Yutaka (an annoying, flirtatious goof-off), Saya (a shy girl who’s always being cornered by elderly people wanting to tell her rambling stories) and Yamagami, our bookish, busty heroine.
Yamagami’s reason for becoming a government employee is personal: her parents gave her an incredibly long and awkward personal name (“Yamagami” is just for short), and she wants to find and get revenge on the government functionary who approved it when he accepted her birth certificate. If this doesn’t sound especially funny, neither is most of this manga. The characters are stick figures differentiated by hair color, the humor is bland, and the personalities are one-note, such as Megumi, the temp employee whose hobby is cosplay (“This is my civil servant cosplay!”) and Touko, the irritable teenage girl who knows more about bureaucracy than any teenager should and is always grilling the employees (“I’m going to test how well you’ve learned your jobs!”). Perhaps the funniest character is the characters’ boss, who turns out to be a stuffed bunny rabbit remotely 
operated by an unseen 50-year-old man (when the characters and the bunny go out drinking, the bunny assures them that although it’s just a toy and can’t drink alcohol, its real body is at home drinking alone).
Office and workplace humor doesn’t need to be about the specifics of the job: The Office is about personalities, not paper sales. That being the case, it’s a relief when Servant x Service moves away from its initial weak bureaucratic in-jokes and toward office romance … if only the romance wasn’t between Yamagami and the obnoxious but supposed-to-be-sympathetic Hasebe, who teases her about her breast size, while other characters point out “That’s harassment!”, making an unfunny joke unfunnier. As the characters gradually become more fleshed out and their interactions more interesting, the occasional flashes of wit become more common, but it’s like wading through 300 pages of paperwork to get there.
publisher: Yen Press
story and art: Karino Takatsu
rating: 13+
