Each time a new volume of Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun is released I have to restrain myself from immediately taking snapshots of all of the gags, not only because I’m worried that Yen Press would send my twitter account a DMCA if I did, but also because as much as I want to share these jokes, I don’t want to spoil them either!
This is one of the trickier things about reviewing comedy: forget worrying about explaining the joke, how do you talk about a joke without simply describing it? So for this review I have decided to talk about some of the types of jokes in Nozaki-kun’s repertoire, all of which make an appearance in this volume and should excite you:
The Gang Plays A Video Game!
A classic and perhaps one of my favorite Nozaki-kun plots, the gang returns to play another visual novel in this volume! This time around we have Wakamatsu and Mayu beginning to play a visual novel, that Mikorin stashed at Nozaki’s apartment, and Mikorin is agonizing in the background over how these jocks are making all the wrong choices. This subplot actually has a bit of a more upbeat ending than the ending to previous “let’s play” plots, although Mikorin’s admonitions for the two of them not to tell everyone how great this visual novel is, even if it has a great story, was certainly a conversation that real-life nerds have certainly had.
Club Shenanigans
We actually get several sequences related to this. Chiyo’s art club classmates are particularly hilarious, but I was impressed that Tsubaki managed to fill an entire chapter with the simple plot of “the drama club is practicing improv acting, Nozaki takes advantage of this to make the actors act out his rough ideas for the next chapter of ‘Let’s Fall In Love!’” but it certainly works! Nozaki-kun is the type of manga where you laugh right along with the characters at how strange and hilarious their circumstances and reactions are, which has always made the story feel a little more realistic to me, not less, and it was funny both to see how the Drama Club was interpreting the prompts and how often the “audience” was dismayed by the ending. Now you know how your readers feel Nozaki!
The manga-kas confuse their editors
And, as if Nozaki’s editor Ke didn’t have enough to worry about with Nozaki (he’s a bit alarmed at Nozaki’s chapter following the Drama Club improv brainstorming), Ken now has troubles at work unrelated to Nozaki or fellow editor Maeyno! The publisher is proposing creating a new manga magazine for an older readership and, as the editors think about how their current creators would adapt to writing more mature stories, Ken just doesn’t see any way this idea could work out well.
For me the best humor from this chapter was that many of Ken’s worst daydreams about the types of stories the creators would produce actually seem a lot like some current josei series I’ve tried out! I don’t think that this chapter was meant to be any sort of biting commentary on how many josei romances are just shoujo romances with older characters and even more ridiculous circumstances, but it is rather on the nose!
Romance?! Wait no just kidding!
In a previous volume, Seo discovered that Waka has a crush on her singing “alter ego” Lorelei, but somehow Chiyo and Nozaki were able to keep the fact that Waka falls asleep listening to her singing under wraps until now. Alas poor Waka, he spends the majority of a chapter asleep as Seo abuses her new powers and, well, takes advantage of the strange places she can make him fall asleep. I am a little amazed at how elaborate her setups became, especially with the growing crowd of students following Waka around the school to see where he would doze off next. But this honestly might be one of the healthiest interactions they had so far, sort of anyway, so it was amusing to watch Seo abuse her “power” in this way.
With no new volumes on the horizon, as Yen Press has caught up with the Japanese releases, it may be a while before we laugh with these characters again. Who knows, the wait might be so long that I can share those screenshots without worrying about spoilers after all!