I've been re-reading early Lum * Urusei Yatsura recently, for no particular reason. Well, actually, my friend John was over and started reading the first collection, which he noted wasn't as good as Ranma--but I note that he borrowed it anyway--which got me to thinking. I had never liked Lum as much as Ranma (or Maison Ikkoku, or Inu Yasha, to name but three other works by the same author, the world-renowned Rumiko Takahashi), but I remembered it growing on me; what I couldn't remember is why. Was it just the cumulative effect, or was there something specific?
So I started re-reading, to see if I could pin-point the change, and it was obvious. Lum is a series about an alien girl in a tiger-striped bikini, who comes to live on Earth, having engaged herself to a completely worthless letch of a high-school boy, and the comic situations that ensue. Where Ranma 1/2 is a romantic comedy, Lum * Urusei Yatsura (which means something like "Pesky Aliens") is a flat out farce, and unlike Ranma, at least at the start Lum had no real sympathetic characters. The boy, Ataru Moroboshi, is a one-dimensional skirt chaser; his on-again-off-again girlfriend Shinobu is something of a drip (it doesn't help that no self-respecting girl would ever want to have anything to do with Ataru); Lum herself comes across as obstinate and hot-tempered, and, at least with respect to Shinobu, somewhat cruel. The basic situation, where a) Shinobu wants Ataru, but can't have him because of Lum, b) Lum wants Ataru, but can't have him because c) Ataru wants Shinobu (or anybody but Lum) but can't have her/them because of Lum, is a drag--it doesn't admit of even a temporarily happy ending. Lum was Takahashi's first work on her own, and it shows--a lot of what eventually came about in Ranma 1/2 is visible in a cruder, more farcical form here.
What happened that changed the situation? Two things: First, Rumiko Takahashi introduced a new character, named Mendo. Mendo was everything that Ataru was not: rich, handsome, polite, a model student, popular with the girls, and in his own way just as big a schmuck, just as self-centered and oblivious, as Ataru. The introduction of the new character into the mix breaks the triangle: Shinobu now wants Mendo, Mendo wants Lum, Lum wants Ataru, and Ataru wants anybody except Lum. I find that this causes Lum to emerge as the sympathetic character that the series needed; it turns out everyone in the series is fickle (and this gets elaborated upon as more and more characters are added to the mix), except Lum. As demented as her choice is (and it's a little easier to accept since she's an alien, and her interpretations of what humans are about are always a little off), she knows who it is she wants, and she sticks to him, come hell or high water. Where everyone else is as self-centered as a spinning top, Lum becomes the only one who is capable of self-sacrifice or acts of kindness. Yet she doesn't become a door-mat: when Ataru betrays her, as he inevitably does, she unleashes divine retribution in the form of electric zaps.
The second thing that changes is that Takahashi begins to make the characters more aware of what's going on: they move from being spectators to manipulators of the situation. The classmates begin to notice and take advantage of the compulsions of the two idiots Ataru and Mendo, playing them off against eachother. They learn to be wary of the weird alien contraptions that Lum is always unleashing. They begin, in short, to act like normal human beings, which serves to point up the weirdness and make it comical in a way that was lacking earlier in the series.
Now that I've seen that the series does indeed get noticably better as it goes on, I plan to buy some more of the collections.