Title: All-Purpose Chemistry Club! (Bannou Kagaku Hengeibu!)
Genre: Comedy, Supernatural
Publisher: Sobisha (JP), Digital Manga (US)
Artist: Sho Hidaka
Translation: Neri Wesek
Original Release Date: September 9, 2013
Free Preview >>HERE<<
All-Purpose Chemistry Club is one of the weirdest, awfully bad, yet hilariously funny shoujo manga that I’m going to do my best to convince you is somehow good. That’s a difficult task, since the artwork is juvenile, the characters — well, specifically one character — are really dumb, and if there’s an actual story in this volume, it’s nonexistent. And yet, I laughed. Sure, I laughed at the artwork whenever the characters were placed in precarious positions, but I also laughed at some of the random situations they all managed to end up in. In short, this was a fun read, and if you’re in need of a good laugh or two, you might want to pick this up.
Just so you know, this is probably the best artwork you’ll see from this series. No, really, I swear.
Kaede Ipponsugi has a major crush on Momiji Akiyama, and wants to get to know her better and reveal his love to her, but there’s one problem: she’s in the All-Purpose Chemistry Club, which is a haven for exploring the supernatural. Kaede and the supernatural do not go well thanks to an incident as a child. But despite his fears, he joins anyways. This ends up leaving him to meet the “Boss” of the club, and subsequently leads him down a path where ghosts get involved, the club president gets on his case, Momiji’s younger brother gets on his case, and the captain of the basketball team that Kaede should be on gets on his case, in a manner that gets kinda sexual.
Art.
Yeah, All-Purpose Chemistry Club can be seen in two ways: so juvenile and poor that you can only admire how hard it tries to be funny and laugh at it, or just retarded as a manga could possibly be. One reason you’d think of both of these options is the art. It is terrible. It’s obviously going for a certain style, but what that style encompasses must mean terrifically abysmal, since the character designs are inconsistent at best, hard to look at in some cases at worst, with barely any noticeable care paid towards the backgrounds, or in some cases, the panel designs. I’ve read manga with bad art, so this is probably not the worst ever, but it is pretty careless and sloppy more often than not.
Thanks for telling us what we already know, you shallow Hal impersonator you!
But ok, if the art is poor, then maybe it means everything else is great right? Well, that’ll depend on the eye of the beholder. The story is simple: Kaede just wants Momiji to be his girlfriend, but because Momiji has other interests/acts like a brick, it’s going to take a good while before Kaede ever gets a straight answer, and all the while, he has to survive being in a club involved with the supernatural. Thanks to his sister who left him to explore a graveyard alone, he can’t handle ghosts at all. But this angle isn’t explored all that much since it instead prefers to have hijinks with random people. Like the club president. Like a watermelon (ghost). And like costume wearing people eaters. Yes, that is an actual sentence I just wrote. It doesn’t really bother to keep up with the main story too well, which, in some people’s eyes, can be seen as a major negative if the jokes don’t work.
The jokes definitely worked for me.
That’s why I say if you have a bit of courage, you’ll want to try All-Purpose Chemistry Club. Generally comedies can be hit or miss — this was more hit than miss because of the awkward positions of the characters, the timing of the jokes, some jokes just being simple enough to get me going, then something completely random and illogical happens that catches me off guard and makes me laugh. I think the artwork and then seeing a club president randomly have his head bitten off by a “puppy” got to me more than expected:
Sure. That’s a puppy. Sure.
Naturally though, the only way the jokes will work is if the characters manage to be interesting, and well, they pretty much are. Kaede’s just a kid in love who can’t get any love, Momiji’s just a weird girl with a weird brain, and then there’s the boss. I have no idea how the boss can get away with being in school wearing a ninja suit, or how he can manage to cause so much trouble because he didn’t want to wear white tights, but he’s just fun, even though his motivations are never really explained. Hell, no one even knows his name. He’s just there, and manages to be fun somehow. The side characters that are introduced range from interesting (I’ll remember you forever watermelon “that wants to be punished in order to R.I.P” ghost) to dangerous (Takayanagi Kasumi is the Shallow Hal in the modern era. That’s how atrocious her taste is) to instantly forgettable (actually, that entire chapter involving people eating in the classroom was mostly forgettable). But they do their jobs well, and do so well enough to earn my respect.
That’s why despite the terrible art, and also despite the lack of a real story, All-Purpose Chemistry Club is genuinely hilarious. It has the awful art, it avoids telling an actual story, it has a solid amount of good chapters (I just didn’t like the people eating and Momiji tricking Kaede chapters too much), and it comes up with hilarious situations and characters. So if you got some cash to spend, you may want to try this series out. You might as well buy it for the basketball captain at least.
Shhhhhhhiiipppppp~
