Picked up the comic edition because I'm still not awesome enough to read the original novel (and that amazing thickness is kind of a turn off).
Surprisingly, having texts for the description made the whole setting became a lot easier to understand compared to the anime. It really shows that my listening skill is still bad.
Comic version character design is... can't say bad, but quite different from the anime or novel version indeed. Neito here looks even more fit to be casted as male :D