We’re back with another edition of high school boys and girls going wild! Wild in the sense that they continue to do the mundane things extraordinarily. You wouldn’t think your little sister would get so angry at you not just for being an awesome cook, but being an awesome cook despite being intentionally sabotaged by said sister right? A new high school girl showing up a few times and somehow being the last one embarrassed by Hidenori and Yoshitake? The boys dramatically rescuing a…sausage? And did we really have a chapter where three high school girls got all bloodied because…two of the girls crushed a glass cup after learning their long-running hate for each other stemmed from the other girl forgetting she left their lunch money at home — and that it was not stolen — back in 3rd grade?
Just more grand tales abound in the surprisingly bloody and conniving The Daily Lives of High School Boys!
One thing that continues to surprise me is how much you can mine comedy out of just about anything. Like there’s a lot of scenarios in volumes 5 and 6 that in essence shouldn’t be funny. Why would I care about a dude attempting to find a club to actually join, only that he can’t enjoy any of the clubs he joins? Well you create characters with enough distinctive features, have them do the unlikeliest things, and you wind up guffawing when, by the time the main characters actually appear, the effort made by said characters with enough distinctive features reappear in order to get that one student to join their club, and only for that student to say he’s rejoining the soccer team in their presence just destroys you.
Yes, the art can certainly be a turnoff, but at this point, it’s part of the charm. This series is a good example of getting by with your strengths, which for this, is the humor. Being somewhat bland in art can sometimes help with the timing of the jokes. Like when Yanagin and Ikushima want to create rules before they fight, Habara questions why they need rules — and the terror on the two’s faces are genuinely funny. So you’ll either quickly vibe with the style or you won’t, but after seeing these silly high schoolers take one thing and quickly go out of their way to ruin themselves, that’ll be less of a story.
About the only thing I can say this time is I did feel the jokes weren’t as great in volume 6 as it was in volume 5. To be fair though, introducing Hidenori’s dad and the kick the can chapter was pretty great on its own, and then you also have the joining the club chapters, the fake love letter and Yanagin’s sauna escapades in it too. Volume 6 has Ringo somehow getting protected by the Student Council despite her obviousness and two high school boys realizing their ideals may not be as strong as they’d want it to be, but I preferred volume 5 a bit more.
Still though, The Daily Lives of High School Boys continues to be a hilariously memorable romp. This will make its last volume a tough read since there really does feel like more wackiness can ensue.