Most of the manga you see on bookstore shelves falls into a few easily recognizable categories—battles, boobs, and boyfriends, although we prefer to call them shonen, seinen, and shoujo manga.

And then there’s Project X: Cup Noodle, which is sort of a combination business case study and inspirational text; it’s the story of the heroic struggle to develop the familiar ramen-in-a-cup convenience food. While Project X has achieved cult status in the U.S., and other edu-manga are published here from time to time, the genre is still pretty obscure.

So this is a rare treat: Bill Gates: My Computer God, a brief manga (it was published in 1982, when there was less to say) about the Dark Lord of Microsoft himself.

If you read all the way to the end, you will see that this is actually an ad for a computer book, but it’s a good stand-alone manga story about a guy with a special talent who proves himself in a series of struggles. Usually the struggles are more dramatic than debugging a computer or convincing people you’re not too young to do the job, but the dynamic style of this strip somehow makes these pedestrian dramas interesting.

The manga originally appeared in the Japanese manga magazine KoroKoro Comic. It was scanned and translated into English, apparently by Artefact, the blogger who posted it, but left in its original right-to-left orientation. For those who speak Japanese, the untranslated original is also up on the page.

(Note: Some of the content on this page may be NSFW.)