In the throes of summer vacation, everybody is up to something fun. Except for Bocchi, who remains expectant, yet has fallen off everybody’s radar. It’s time for emergency fun, plus the school festival shows up and Bocchi’s stock takes a dive before it rises again.
If anything ever justified my remarks about how much content is crammed into a single volume of 4-koma, consider that after 2/3s of this volume we surpass how far the Bocchi anime managed to get in the storyline with its entire run of episodes.
On the upside, that means that we stop re-treading the same ground after a bit. The horrible music journalist, Aiko, whose age keeps getting progressively younger, gets some really strong gags and firmly sits on the right side of annoying. She’s great.
There’s a lot of strong Bocchi throughout, but she really comes into her own towards the end, where her dreams are about to be realized, except her friends aren’t invited, and she has to consider just how she managed to achieve anything beyond playing guitar online.
Everybody else just stays on their personality traits, although there is a pretty fun tweak on tropes when it comes to who the smart one in the group actually is. And I did appreciate the acknowledgment that the big sister character is, in fact, classic tsundere.
As I noted last time, some of this just works so much better in the anime version. This manga was made to be animated. The summer trip is a hoot in the anime, but there’s just something overly whiny about the manga that irked me somewhat.
And as good as the school festival arc is, there’s no possible way that it can live up to the absolute killer version in the anime, one of my favourite scenes in anything last year, where Bocchi just obliterates everything holding her back, right before comedic timing sends her plummeting back to earth.
For the reader who doesn’t have that to go on, however, these will hit pretty good, but there’s definitely a flair the anime brings to all of this that I cannot disconnect from personally and does elevate the material from mere print.
The one place the manga does step ahead is with its constant visual gags related to Japanese music acts and other such digs. It’s pretty clear that beyond the goofing around, the mangaka has a sharp eye for parody as well and it does fill in the series a bit more than the anime.
As before, bless the extensive translation notes that show how much thought went into some of those jokes. These are the thickest set of notes I’ve seen in some time and they definitely enrich the experience. It’s still a good read without them, but they are appreciated.
3.5 stars - the new stuff is great, the old stuff is good, but was done better in another medium. I think this is still a worthwhile read and I actually suspect that now that I don’t have the anime version to reference, subsequent volumes will do better with me.