To paraphrase myself from my review of this volume in Japanese, “One of the defining characteristics of an adult life is facing setbacks. You can work really hard, gambare with all you have and still not achieve the goal. Sometimes it’s hard and sometimes it’s just life. In The Two Of Them Are Pretty Much Like This, Volume 3, its both.”

“Wanko” is giving it her all, doing audition after audition. The one job she had gotten is canceled for reasons that are beyond her control. (And which resonate kind of hard this season, after the recent scandals of a major production group in Japan.) She’s working that treadmill hard, but she’s not getting anywhere.

Ellie is struggling with a wholly different problem. She’s been given an opportunity. One of the best in the business is mentoring her, with a tough love attitude and hard, cold facts. Now that she has an opening, she’s not at all confident that she’ll be able to move forward. 

Wanko really wants to be a full partner in their lives together, so despite her loss of her job, she contributes to the month’s rent. Ellie would be happy to let Wanko keep it, but she’s 100% supportive of her partner’s choice. Again, as I said, in my review of the JP edition, ” get yourself someone who looks at you the way Sakuma looks at Wako.”  Ikeda-sensei’s art is great in this volume, with expressions and body language really dragging you in to the emotional backdrop of every scene. But – and I will say this every time – his art hits new levels when he just does a panel of Ellie. He loves drawing her and it shows.

Solid work by the team at Seven Seas. Anh Kiet Ngo had a few challenging passages here and came through with a solid translation. (I was thinking about this just a moment ago, when I made an excruciating pun to my wife that was both in-joke and tortured English and I had a thought about how impossible that is to translate. This series is full of that kind of thing. Rina Mappa’s lettering is solid, but she is not given time to retouch which would have looked better. Give letterers time and money to retouch!

Overall a funny, poignant volume of this lovable series.

Ratings:

Art – 9
Characters – 9
Story – 8
Service – 5 Light nudity
Lesbian – 10

For a slightly goofy, slightly realistic story of two women (and their colleagues and friends) adulting together and being in love, this is a quietly outstanding story.  I hope you’ll pick it up and give it a read.