Let’s be blunt. Suzunari was not written for me, W.C. Fields or anyone like us. It was written for a particular kind of reader – primarily male, adult, who likes cats and kids, not quite inappropriately. They find cat ears and maid costumes on girls irrestibly adorable, like Yuri-cest, and don’t mind a story that is not complex, as long as it has most of the above in some measure. This is moe fandom and Suzunari is for them.

In Volume 2, Suzu and Kaede slide through many of the typical school-life tropes; school trips and festivals and class activities, in a jerky, semi-non-linear fashion. I expect that the timing made more sense for the months in which the manga ran in its magazine. Like soap operas, manga may be anywhere in the story line, but will always be seasonally appropriate. :-)

Suzu’s need to be acknowledged and her love explicitly returned becomes more and more of a critical plot device, one that – to me at least – makes even less sense once we learn who Suzu is. As a cat, she avoided being smothered by Kaede’s love, but as a catgirl now smothers Kaede. Of all things in this manga, this was the hardest for me to make sense of. The ending struck me as especially uncomfortable, so I simply stopped trying to make sense of the story and read the darn thing one 4-koma at a time, letting the continuity (or lack thereof) slip away as a non-issue. You can’t make champagne from pebbles and I wasn’t about to try and make literature from Suzunari. lol

If you like catgirls, moe, Yuri twincest, and all the usual clothing fetishes that go with them, I have no doubt that you will enjoy Suzunari, too. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 5
Story – 3
Characters – 4
Yuri – 5
Service – 9

Overall – 4

My sincere thanks to Ed S, our newest Okazu Hero! His sponsorship made today’s review possible. Ed is a great reviewer in his own right, check out his reviews at Comics Worth Reading, as well as being a swell guy. So thanks Ed and welcome to the roll of Okazu Heros!

Behind the premise of High School Girls, Volume 9 runs a strong feeling of nostalgia for the bygone days of youth. “Time Stopped at Age Seventeen” screams one header prominently, which immediately causes me to cringe with a feeling of horror crawling up my spine. It wasn’t that my high school years were bad – far from it, I had a great time. However, there is NOTHING that would ever be incentive enough for me to want to have that time extended by a single second. lol

Not so for Eriko or the other girls in the Idiot group, each one of which is determined to wring as much fun from the rag of life as they can. And I approve. What the hell good is being 17 if you’re not going off and doing incredibly dumb things that must be fun because everyone tells you so? Heck, what’s the good of life at all if you’re not having fun doing dumb things? When was the last time you did something fun and dumb?

Anyway, the trip to Okinawa draws to a close and everyone on the trip is as annoying as possible, as all high school students are on trips. (Flashback to Virgina Beach, 1982. Oh. Gawd.)

And in the middle of the crazy fun dumb annoying things, we learn the deep dark secret of the Takarazuka couple…which turns out to neither be all that dark nor deep nor really even important. But it does short of shape their relationship…which is no less Yuri because of it. If anything, I’m now inclined to think that they are lovers, and are just hiding it behind a clever mask of obviousness. Why not – they are only fictitious characters and I can pretty much think anything I want about them. ^_^

So, while this series is actually meant for adults males to look back fondly on the dreams they have of a girl’s school and have those dreams crushed cruelly, as an adult woman who does not like to think about high school except when it can’t be avoided, it was all still pretty funny. With a little Yuri on the side. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 7 I liked the tour guide and her hostility
Characters – 7 Did I mention I liked the tour guide?
Yuri – 5 Just because they’re obvious doesn’t meant they aren’t together
Sevice – 6 Tempered by all sorts of brutally blatant “womens’ issues”

Overall – 7

I have to mention the quality of the reproduction. It is so far improved from the early volumes that it’s almost like a completely different company is doing it. Dr Master has really shown incredible improvement over the early days. No question, this reproduction is tight.

4-koma comics, the Japanese analogy to the western comic strip, tend to follow a pattern. Like comic strips, they focus on talking heads, doing rather formulaic things. Think of any mainstream comic strip or even popular webcomics, and you can see the pattern pretty quickly. The most common formula is two to four people, conversations about topical or typical situations, with a punchline that relies on irony, wordplay or a twist of meaning. 4-koma are similar, although they rely a little bit more on the vaudevillian formulas of Manzai comedy. This makes them a little repetitive over time. Crazy cosplay-obsessed teacher will always be crazy and cosplay-obsessed. Wacky offbeat girl who is always hungry will be wackily offbeat – and hungry. The ambiguously gay couple will always be ambiguously gay and average girl will always “try her best.”

Which brings us to Sunshine Sketch, Volume 3 in which all of the above is what it is. No new ground is covered. Instead of plot complications, we get characters added to the cast. In this book, Yuno’s parents arrive. They seem pretty normalish, which makes sense because Yuno is pretty normalish. Everyone else remains the same, the gags become well-worn, comfortable in-jokes that we can all smile and share in, because we are all in the in-crowd here. When new characters move off, we introduce *props*. The highlights of the end of volume three is the addition of a cat, a bicycle and a Polaroid camera.

Sunshine Sketch isn’t a story, really. It’s a series of the same 12 or so gags, recycled over and over again. It would be well-suited to a webcomic, in fact. But new territory isn’t what we’re looking for with this manga. We’re just killing some time in the company of a few of the residents of the Hidamari Apartments. That’s all we want – and that’s all we get. But that’s just fine by us. ^_^

Sae and Hiro are ambiguously Yuri. I think Hiro would be fine with them as a couple. Sae is your basic clueless butchy character. Remember, in Yuri (as so often in real life) butch=uke, not seme. It’s up to Hiro to do something. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 7
Characters – 7
Yuri – 3
Service – 2

Overall – 7

Another amusing 4-koma comic strip that makes pleasant reading, but leaves no lingering flavor. Which is exactly what I said about it last time, but I might as well have a formulaic review template for formulaic books. :-)

Thanks to Okazu Hero Amanda M for sponsoring today’s review!