Senpai and Nagatoro are closer than ever, but Senpai’s art career is in jeopardy from his chronic nerves. Enlisting the help of her nemesis, Nagatoro finds the cure might be worse than the disease, unless she plans to reveal way more of herself than usual. Yes, it’s time to put the right to bare arms, and pretty much everything else, on the line.
After a recent run of mediocrity in my manga, I turned to the foolish antics of these two doorknobs to try and turn the tide, which ended up being the absolute correct choice as this volume is a solid notch above the baseline Nagatoro fare and one of the best in recent memory.
Now that any pretence of them not liking one another is out the window, you’d think we’d just be killing time until the confession and the kiss, which we are, but the decision to be as ridiculous as possible while we wait pays off in massive dividends this time out.
The first chapter is actually a rather sweet one about Senpai trying to hold Nagatoro’s hand and if there’s one trope I won’t be sick of any time soon, it’s a character who proclaims they know all about romance from shojo manga.
My only complaint here is that we don’t see more of the story-within-the-story, which is just gender swap Nagatoro and very funny as a consequence. It’s an easy joke, but that doesn’t make it less fun and there’s a very clever callback within the chapter at the end that I liked.
I’m particularly focused on this one chapter because it really drives home the new dynamic between Senpai and Nagatoro - he tries very, very hard and sometimes he needs a hand (cough) and then she helps get him the rest of the way. It’s very cute.
The big story, however, is Senpai getting in over his head at art school, or, more accurately, stuck in his head and on the verge of his big dream going under due to his nerves.
Naturally Nagatoro comes to the rescue, but knowing nothing about art she turns to the former Club President, whose penchant for exhibitionism and back-breaking breasts are once more on full display, especially once she says that the solution is for Senpai to draw more nude models.
The story even directly references the monkey’s paw idea, so it knows what it’s doing, even as the Ex-President displays herself all over creation (the censoring of her nipples being annoyed Nagatoro chibi heads is so good).
So while the former President prepares to do her bit for Senpai, Nagatoro has a minor meltdown, but then has another (more major) meltdown when the obvious solution is presented to her to get around this problem.
Oh yes, we go there. And it is not for nothing that I note the way this plays out is shockingly tasteful given everything that surrounds it. There’s definitely some ‘have your ecchi and eat it too’, but it’s pretty much the reverse of how godawful that shower sequence was a book or two ago.
Everything else is just as fun, honestly. There’s a funny callback to an idea Nagatoro had several volumes back and some of the between-chapter gags are the best the series has ever done - the one after the ‘secret move’ chapter is exactly the kind of insanity you want in your gag manga.
Also, Yoshi decides to speak in Spanish for a few panels just because and it probably made me laugh the hardest of anything in the entire volume because it’s so incredibly random, yet she is saying things that are contextually accurate (yes, I went and looked up translations).
If there’s a failing, it is indeed that nothing is going on here in terms of plotting, so you can charitably call it a little slow, but I think the fun more than makes up for it. Even the extra horny bonus manga pays off with one absolute banger of a punch line.
4.5 stars - yeah, it doesn’t really go anywhere, but it makes sure that everybody, including the reader, is having a really great time while it drags out the inevitable. And if all the volumes were this fun, I wouldn’t even complain, so I’ll give it the high praise this time out.