Aa Megami-sama

Keiichi Morisato is a college sophomore who accidentally calls the Goddess Help Line. The goddess Belldandy materializes and tells him that her agency has received a system request from him and has been sent to grant him a single wish. Believing that a practical joke is being played on him, he wishes that she will stay with him forever, and his wish is granted.

Since he is unable to live with Belldandy in his male-only dorms, they are forced to look for alternative housing, eventually seeking shelter in an old Buddhist temple. They are allowed to stay there indefinitely after the young monk living there leaves on a pilgrimage to India upon being impressed by Belldandy's intrinsic goodness. Keiichi's life with Belldandy becomes even more hectic when her elder sister Urd and her younger sister Skuld move in as well. A series of adventures ensue as his relationship with Belldandy develops.

, Kōsuke Fujishima created the manga You're Under Arrest!. , was featured as a goddess character in a four-panel gag strip in the manga. While the exact relationship between this initial goddess character and the Oh My Goddess! series is unclear, there are suggestions that Oh My Goddess!

can be viewed as a spin-off series. Irrespective of the origin, the concept of a goddess "as a job" interested Fujishima, leading to the first appearance of the Oh My Goddess! series in Kodansha's Monthly Afternoon in September 1988.

As of June 2020, the manga had over 25 million copies in circulation. In 2009, Oh My Goddess won the 33rd Kodansha Manga Award in the general category. Volume 41 of the manga was the tenth best-selling manga in Japan upon its release that week according to the Oricon Japanese Comic Rankings charts. The film ranked #28 on Wizard's Anime Magazine on their "Top 50 Anime released in North America". In the American Anime Awards from 2007, the anime series was a nominee in the category Best Comedy Anime, but lost to FLCL.