In early 2014 I stumbled across images from a 4-koma gag manga on tumblr — Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun, which none of my friends had even heard of. Happily enough, the anime was announced shortly later, a slightly more accessible English title was slapped onto it, and people did in fact adore it enough for both the anime and the manga to be brought over. I am a little confused why the digital version of the manga is being delayed so much (this volume went on sale in mid-November, the first digital volume drops across all platforms in late February, the day the second print volume is released actually) but if you prefer your manga printed to pixels here’s why you should be reading it now.
Even though this is the third or fourth time I’ve seen some of these jokes I still found myself laughing multiple times in each chapter. This is a much stronger work than Tsubaki’s other current series Oresama Teacher; it seems that putting the whole story into a four panel format really helps with the pacing and distancing the story from the real world. It also means I’m not bothered by pesky thoughts like “Wait, if this is summer vacation shouldn’t they have advanced another year?”
When I talk about pacing for this series though, I mean both within a gag (ie, a single page) and for an entire chapter. In Lucky Star I complained that the jokes were too disconnected from each other so there was barely a point to having chapters at all, and Nozaki-kun handles this issue much better. There is more than one joke in each chapter, far more, but the jokes also feel connected — one silly action leads to another to another until you end up with Nozaki and Mikorin on the floor after pulling an all nighter making doujinshi.
In short, this series is tremendously funny and I feel like this story is so silly in some ways that even casual anime and manga fans could “get” it. It may be easier to convince them to try out the anime first (it really was a great adaptation) but if you’ve already seen the anime and are debating whether or not to pick up the manga, go for it. It has a few jokes the anime had to cut out (“Hey what color are Nozaki’s PJs?”) and, if we never get another season of the anime, you definitely want to keep reading. These gags are good but trust me, they only get even sillier and better from here.
