Manga from Shounen Jump Magazine created by Masakazu Katsura (creator of DNA^2 and Video Girl Ai) and his Studio K2R. The title is prononces A-I-Zu in Japanese. This extremely successful manga ran from 1997-2000 and is collected in 15 tankoubon paperbacks.
The title is a play at the main protagonists names, that all begin with the letter "I": Seto Ichitaka, Yoshizuki Ioru and Akiba Itsuki. Once more Katsura created a romantic comedy that keeps it's readers begging for the next chapter all the time. The story is complex and revolves around the male lead character, Ichitaka, who has a crush on Ioru, but is unable to tell her in fear of being rejected. He in turn is loved by his childhood sweetheart Itsuki, whom he had all but forgotten, when their family moved away, but now has returned because of him. Later on, the story is further complicated by the entry of the fourth "I", Izumi. The characterizations and drawings are highly realistic, the girls are drawn very cute and sexy, maybe even slightly ecchi, the story is always fresh and exciting, so this is a highly recommendable manga.
There is a short OVA anime based on the manga called From I''s which was recently released on two DVD's. The anime features a new story revolving around the characters from the manga, not a story from the manga itself. However, the animation is rather poor, though cute.
Here are a few links for more information:
- http://www.multimania.com/k2r98/katis/top.htm
- http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Island/1443/
- http://baka.k2r.net/anime/aizu