UTF-8 locale, strange chars in X terminal pager(s), specifically man pages

[fbhjr@fhase.net (Frederick B. Henry Jr.)]

Greetings, 

Context: Debian unstable. I have the ucs fonts package installed, as well
as several classical polytonic Greek fonts, which render very well in
Mozilla Firefox.  I can start an xterm thusly: 

xterm -u8 -fn \
'-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1'

It displays the "UTF-8-demo.txt" file nicely, with the sole exception of
Amharic Ethiopian, which is displayed as outline boxes per character.

Since switching my locale to en_US.UTF-8 (dpkg-reconfigure locales),
whenever I use any pager (more, less, most) to read a man page I get
strange chars, e.g.:

man procmailrc (PAGER=/usr/bin/most) yields: 

"delivering and nonâ@~^Pdelivering recipes.."  

That intercalating pattern -- â@~^PP -- is throughout the man page.

I have tried the same in a utf-8 xterm with the same result.  

Is there some specific font I should be using?  How do I get a clean man
page in an xterm/aterm/rxvt/mlterm with a UTF-8 locale?

output of locale:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=


Any hints or help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Fred Henry, Jr.