School Rumble Manga Volume 10

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Summary/Synopsis:

Class 2-C celebrates their successes with a party. However, there’s a problem with the cakes and the names on them. 2-C then puts on their play, only with an all-female cast with Eri as the lead prince. Things take a turn to the bizarre as Harima, having chosen a poor place to sleep, finds himself in the princess’s bed and on stage. This is thrown further into chaos when Yakumo is also in the bed. Thus Yakumo and Eri are forced to improv and battle over Harima. The play ends a success with Ichijo’s band performing. Yakumo and Eri make up and even have a dance where Eri confesses she enjoys the challenge Yakumo provides her.

Satsuki is introduces as a 1st-year female student who’s wanting to start a girl’s basketball team. With Tenma’s male classmate Aso chosen as coach and Anegasaki-sensei as manager, the team comes together with Lala, Ichijo, Mikoto, Sagano, and even Tenma as members. However, Tenma isn’t good and Anegasaki-sensei relegates her to “sub.” It becomes clear that Satsuki has feelings for “Aso-senpai” which leads to her performance as a basketball player suffering. When Aso attempts to help her, Satsuki misunderstands his statements as him prompting her to confess her feelings.

In the omake chapters, Shuuji is attending the school festival (because of Harima) along with a girl in his class named Mio (who’s older brother often battles Harima). Mio has feelings for Shuuji though Shuuji is always on about Tsukamoto-neechan. In the end, Shuuji shows he does care about Mio.

Next, Itoko and Youko are in a sports car and end up in a drag race. While they win, their intent was not to race, but to get to a spot so that Youko could paint a perfect sunset.

Finally, Yakumo has an encounter with the same girl ghost who’d talked to her about boys and relationships while Iori takes on a human form briefly to give Yakumo an umbrella to protect her from the rain.

Thoughts/Review:

Funny!

While I have always enjoyed School Rumble, having watched the anime takes a lot out of reading the same (and original) stories in the manga, especially the funny stuff. This time, that was not the case for me for some reason. I think that while recent stories from Kobayashi-sensei have been amusing, the play put on by 2-C just made me laugh all over again from several unexpected moments. Yeah, I may have seen this in the Nigakki anime, but I didn’t remember many of the little details and thus the laughs (ah, Hanai!). The cake fiasco just cracked me up.

I love the symbolic battle between Eri and Yakumo over Harima. While School Rumble may be mostly about unrequited loves and parodies, I can’t help but want Harima to end up with one of them (preferably Yakumo).

Kobayashi-sensei has accomplished something rather neat with School Rumble, which I realized with the introduction of Satsuki. Kobayashi-sensei continues to introduce new characters throughout the first 10 volumes. Sometimes, characters may not gel right away but then he continues to work with them to make them better (Lala for example). Satsuki worked for me right away and she allows Kobayashi-sensei to work on Aso, who’s been a secondary character for a long time. So even though we have these other characters outside of the core characters (while not forgetting them), for the most part he’s managed to make them interesting enough so that I’m not thinking, “Gah! Get back to the main characters!” (which is something I did a lot of in the 2nd half of KareKano).

Bottom line: This volume went above the normal “amusing and fun” level to laugh out loud funny for me, thus resulting in my gushing in this review. Bring on volume 11!