Otomen 4

Aya Kanno – Viz – 2009 – 9+ volumes

I don’t know, every time I read a volume of this, I become more and more convinced that it’s impossible to hate it if you like shoujo manga at all.  On one hand, it’s cycling through story cliches, but on the other hand, it’s doing that on purpose.  I can’t figure out if it’s trying to make fun of the overused stories, or its characters, or both.  It’s hard to see through all those sparkles, but it’s funny stuff no matter where the humor lies.

I forgot how much I liked this series, then promptly remembered within the first few pages when Asuka took Ryo’s dad to a strangely cutesy department store, populated by stuffed animals and only the most adorable merchandise shops.  Ryo’s dad seems to hate every minute of it, and has a hard time dealing with the… floweriness of it all.  The faces the two make while in the shops are funny enough (the dad is super-embarrassed, and Asuka cycles through ecxtacy and shame), but what really put the whole thing over the top was Princess Mary’s Hide-and-Go-Seek pasta.  It really was one of the most adorable things I’ve ever seen.

The second half of the book is taken up by a storyline involving the group spending summer vacation working at a shop owned by Yamato’s uncle.  The “getting there” part is quite funny, and the story knowingly and ridiculously rushes through the sequence of events that puts just the students in charge of a run-down, unpopular and old-fashioned shack competing with a very modern snack bar.  Everyone uses their individual talents, be they ultra-manly or super-girly, to ultimately make the shop a success, but both chapters with this storyline feature competitions with Tonomine, Asuka’s rival and secret otomen who loves to do makeup.  Tonomine cracked me up for a reason Juta mentions later in the story – he’s the usual bespeckled cold-type boy that these stories always have, except he really is super-arrogant and never really shows another side to his personality.  That’s a real shame, because I think otomen should stick together.

A new character is introduced, a really tall, quiet boy who likes flowers and sneaking up on people to decorate them with flowers.  I mean, he loves flowers.  Way more than Asuka loves baking and sewing.  He’s quite creepy, and a wonderful addition to the story.  He reminds me a lot of another really famous character who is silent and likes sneaking up, except the name and details are escaping me at the moment.

Reading this after Detroit Metal City is probably a bad thing, because the style of humor is the same.  Both succeed by doing the exact opposite of what is expected in the story setup, with some additional help from the way the side characters react (though Otomen isn’t as gag-driven as Detroit Metal City).  Each chapter is basically a one-shot where Asuka fumbles through a situation where certain things are expected of him, but he succeeds because he likes girly things.  Usually the other characters run contrary to what you would expect too, like Ryo having ultra-manly hobbies while still being mostly girly, the creepy flower boy, or the girly boy who would be absolutely devastated if he found out Asuka had such un-manly hobbies.  There are occasional hilarious male fantasies that break up all the sparkles and jokes otherwise.  Otomen brilliance lies in the fact you can read it like a regular shoujo manga, too.  You can ignore the humor, and just enjoy it for the sparkles and all the shoujo manga things it does.

I think it helps that Aya Kanno has mentioned more than once that she hates girly things, and isn’t well-suited to drawing a series like this.  I can only imagine Otomen getting popular as a kind of mangaka hell for her, but on the other hand, I think that’s why the humor works so well… it’s a super-girly shoujo manga drawn by someone who secretly hates super-girly shoujo manga.

I have to say, I am a little disappointed that there’s not a lot of forward momentum in the plot, but as long as Juta keeps calling attention to this and the story is perfectly aware of what it’s doing, I’ll keep reading.  The new character also blew my mind, and I’m very excited about getting to see more of him.  I believe I was promised an Otomen band as well, and I just can’t stop before I get to see that.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.