If your first reaction upon looking at the title of Seven Seas' newest monster girl offering is to think, “Wow, the monster girl genre has definitely gone too far,” you could be forgiven. From the outside, My Girlfriend Is a T-Rex just looks like another Monster Musume spin-off trying to cash in on the craze. While that is true to some extent, Sanzo's debut title is actually a very funny send-up of the genre as much as it's about a guy involved with a hot monster girl, and the spot-on parodies and utter bizarreness of the book easily overcome any genre weariness you may be feeling – and might even be worth reading if you aren't a monster girl fan at all.

The story's premise is something of a parody all its own. In most cases, monster girls have always existed in a separate world or hidden pocket of reality and are now interested in fostering relationships with humans. In Sanzo's story, the only monsters who exist are actual dinosaurs who have evolved to be attractive to humans in order to avoid extinction. This in itself is pretty funny, given the usual mythology about dinosaurs as dangerous beasts, but what's even more bizarre is the way they've evolved: they're dinosaurs from the waist down, with human torsos and faces sporting dinosaur arms and teeth. It makes fun of the idea that human men will happily overlook a spider lower body or a tail if there are big enough boobs and a pretty face on top of it by throwing in scaly arms, killer claws, and tails that clearly have minds of their own. Sanzo also differs from the norm in his worldbuilding by making it clear that there are male dinosaurs as well; one of the later characters to come in is a little dino-boy, and Yuuma has an encounter with a dino-man.

While all of these factors help set the story apart from its genre brethren, what really sells it is its breezy pacing. Yuuma, an outwardly dippy college student with a hidden past, treats Churio more like a large talking dog than a girlfriend, and Churio herself acts more like a rescue dog than either a dinosaur or a human. She's simple (but not necessarily stupid), putting everything in her mouth on the assumption that it's food, wagging her enormous tail, and trying her best (or at least as hard as she feels like) to fit in with the world. This means actually wearing clothes and living in a house rather than an abandoned warehouse, but it also involves learning things like “I'm cold” doesn't translate to “incubate me like an egg.” Her delightful lack of self-consciousness is great paired with Sanzo's slapstick brand of humor. The whole book reads like a tongue-in-cheek joke about the monster girl genre, with Churio's friend, Torika the velociraptor, being a “predator” by bilking guys out of clothes and jewelry. The way Sanzo draws his dinosaurs can be particularly disconcerting, which works for the humor – moe or angelic faces coexisting on the same body as vicious dino claws makes for a strange yet funny disconnect.

The art isn't particularly strong, especially in terms of the faces, which is an issue given the premise, but it's good enough to work. This is largely because the book is written in four-panel format, although this is more a statement on each section's brevity than the actual layout. Rather than four vertical panels, each story takes up one to two pages set up like a typical manga. Like four-panel works, each mini-story within the chapter has its own title, but the format reads more easily for those not accustomed to more traditional four-koma manga.

My Girlfriend Is a T-Rex's first volume definitely exceeds expectations. It plays with the monster girl genre in its setup and characters, making its world seem totally weird and strangely normal at the same time. Churio's personality is somehow winning in its simplicity, and Sanzo does make efforts to show us just why Yuuma was willing to take her on in the first place, making for a good “tragic” backstory that doesn't overstate itself. The story relies just as much on jokes that have nothing to do with the fact that its heroine is half-dinosaur, which helps make the absurdity stand out even further. If you're looking for a light and silly read, you can't do much better than this.