Review: School Rumble, Vol. 1
originally written for and posted on Comicsnob.com [Dec ’06 – May ’08]
School Rumble, Vol. 1
Published by: Del Rey Books
Writer & Artist: Jin Kobayashi
192 (162) pages
Original Language: Japanese
Orientation: Right to left
Vintage: 2003. US edition February 2006.
English Translation & Adaptation: William Flanagan
Letterer: Dana Hayward
Publisher’s Rating: Older Teen, ages 16+
Rating: 2 out of 5
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Premise: High school romance, the comedy.
Synopsis:
A collection of 18 ’shorts’, each smaller story featuring a different problem in the love lives of a small group of High School students.
Tsukomoto Tenma is a second-year student, and she has a big ol’ crush on Karasuma Oji. He’s calm, cool, collected, and completely clueless as to how she feels.
Harima Kenji is a delinquent, a drop-out, and a motorcycle-riding badass who generally gets along by beating up or running over anything in his way. It turns out he has a big crush on Tenma. But she’s also clueless as to how Kenji feels. Well, she’s clueless in general.
After the first few chapters set up this love triangle and the rest of the story, events proceed as you’d expect, with any number of good ideas to get close to or to confesses to the object of one’s affection going horrible awry, or just failing with a comedic flop.
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Review:
Let me say a few good things first. The art is nice, the girls are cute, there is a fairly tight story focus and the short chapters make for a brisk read.
Another nice touch is the differing art styles employed; when Tenma is the main character the art is crisp, if perhaps a bit manga-generic, but when the delinquent Harima is featured, Kobayashi switches to a looser, grittier style, with screen tones often replaced by cross-hatching and other hand-drawn shading, especially in the fights and other action sequences. It’s a neat gimmick, and certainly gives you the feeling that poor Harima really has been dropped from another comic entirely, right into the middle of white-bread suburban high.
The bits of background and other scenery are sparse, though. In quite a few panels (and regrettably, a few whole pages) it seems like the characters are floating in white space.
The cast is small, though additional teachers and students– nameless extras– step in as needed. It looks like the series is going to concentrate on Tenma, her sister Yamuko, and three of Tenma’s friends, with Harima as added comic relief and the enigmatic Oji only there as an object for Tenma’s affections.
The back cover and other promotional materials have pitched this as an ‘over the top’ comedy. And at it’s best, it is chuckle inducing– usually when there is some excuse for Harima to whop someone upside the head. Some of the setups shade a bit dark for real comedy, though, and there may have been some losses in translation.
Del Rey has done a decent job with the adaptation, with lots of notes (the end notes not only explain some of the trickier translations, they reprint the panel in question so you don’t have to flip back through the book) and some care in keeping a lot of the flavour of the original Japanese. They leave written foley in the original katakana script (with translations in small subscript) for example. But even with all that effort, it doesn’t always play well. The manga didn’t make me laugh out loud, which might generally be considered a failure.
From the setting (high school) to the characters (students) to the setup (crushes, love triangles, and unrequited love), School Rumble is close to being a typical (or even stereotypical) plain-vanilla manga. Kobayashi uses all the usual visual conventions– including intercutting with cute, cartoony versions of characters and similar wild-takes to emphasise a punchline– so if that aspect of the manga style is hard for you to take in large doses then even the good jokes won’t make you laugh.
Sometimes the comedy and the story work, sometimes they don’t. If you like the premise, or perhaps if you’re closer (in age, temperament, or relative hormone levels) to the whole high-school-crush thing, then this manga might “work” more often for you than it does for me. But I think a lot of us would rather go read something with more explosions in it.
