Otomen 5

Aya Kanno – Viz – 2010 – 9+ volumes

This was my choice for best new series of 2009.  I felt a little bad for choosing this over 20th Century Boys, but I feel like I made the right decision after reading this volume.  I may feel differently tomorrow, when I read the newest volume of 20th Century Boys, but for right now, Otomen is making me laugh too hard to change my mind.  20th Century Boys probably is the better series, but the two are apples and oranges and nearly impossible to compare.  Otomen certainly was the best shoujo manga last year, and I started off not even liking it much.

Starting this volume, I liked it, but I was a little afraid the weird meta magic was wearing off.  The first storyline with Ryo playing Yamato Nadeshiko was okay, but full of jokes that had already been told.  We know Ryo is manly.  We know that Asuka is not, and that he is better than her at all the challenges in the contest she is entered in at school.  She fails in all the ways you would expect, though I still laughed pretty hard at some of them (the best was probably the flower arrangement contest, where only Kitora sees the manly beauty in her arrangement).  The other problem is that Ryo just isn’t a very good character to stand as the main character in a story.  She hardly gets any dialogue, and she’s a rather simple character.  I don’t dislike her, and her silence keeps her from being truly one-dimensional, but it’s hard to understand what she’s doing and why when you can’t hear her thoughts or see her reacting in anything other than a completely detached and silent way to everything.

The second story in the book is solid gold, though.  Juta is the main character, and it revolves around his Love Chick manga winning the Kodakusensa Manga Award and his worries about having to give the acceptance speech and revealing himself to be a male.  Juta is a good and very funny character, and Love Chick is my favorite part of the series, so already the chapter had a lot going for it.  But then he actually arrives at the ceremonies, and the page where Asuka (there as a rep from his mother’s business) exlaims that the shoujo mangaka party was exactly what he thought it was, followed by a panel full of shoujo manga artists drawn in a very simplistic and very shoujo style, made me laugh so hard I had to stop reading for awhile and let the joke sit.  And that wasn’t even the best part of the chapter!  It was a joy to see the regular-looking Asuka and Juta conversing with the oddly cartoony shoujo mangaka, but the real treat came with Juta’s mentor, drawn to look like a full-blown 70s European shoujo character with advice to give Juta.  Everything about this chapter was amazing.  Amazing.  AMAZING.  This is why I will keep choosing Otomen as the best again and again.  Because it earns my respect with the sweat on its sparkly brow.

The third story is good too, and gets off to a good start with a flashback to young Asuka giving a very frank report about his father in front of his grade school class and then goes on to pair him with Hajime as masked samurai giving beauty advice in a callback to an older story.  It suffered for following the Love Chick story, but it does look like it will lead to Asuka meeting back up with his father in the next volume, so I am definitely looking forward to that.

There’s still no plot development, and I was a little sad that two major opportunities for characters to advance the plot (Ryo/Asuka in one and Juta in another) were wasted, but on the other hand, I’m still enjoying what it’s doing immensely, so I can’t complain.  I’m incredibly pleased with the way it seems to deliver a story exactly to my tastes whenever I think it might be slipping, and if it keeps going like this, it will become one of my very favorite shoujo manga.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.