Title: My Neighbor Seki (Tonari no Seki-Kun)
Genre: Comedy
Publisher: Media Factory (JP), Vertical Inc (US)
Artist: Takuma Morishige
Serialized in: Comic Flapper
Translation: Yoshito Hinton
Original Release Date: January 13, 2015
Title: My Neighbor Seki (Tonari no Seki-Kun)It’s a great pleasure to jump back into the world that Seki himself created. I watched the anime last year, and it made my Top 10 of 2014 despite being a short. Vertical was kind enough to license the manga and release it, and in reading Volume 1, it put a nice big smile on my face and made me realize how much I miss that dumb show. I’m glad it’s back, even in manga form.
Takuma Morishige’s breakout hit, as he’s done two manga, one in Akita Shoten’s Weekly Shounen Champion and the other currently running monthly in Bessatsu Shounen Champion, My Neighbor Seki revolves around Seki, an immediate contender for the laziest school student in manga history. Instead of paying attention to class at any level, he manages to goof off immeasurably. Yokoi, his classmate and seat neighbor, is annoyed at his attitude towards school and spends this volume telling him to stop goofing off. He doesn’t comply.
The type of stories involving Seki goofing off are highly entertaining. And if you thought it was entertaining in animated form, it’s just as great in panel form. It helps that the main character just does not give any crap in learning whatsoever. To have a character like that is rare. I bet there’s not a lot of personalities like that in this type of setting. Yokoi playing the straight man ends up working well, especially when the actual goofing off is kind of crazy. You’d think chapters involving chess, go, and dominoes would be boring, but instead, Seki manages to do something crazy with them. Point in case, a chapter where he ends up combining all of the black chess pieces into one huge piece, uses it to literally crush the white pieces, and Yokoi can only be angry internally as he does all of this.
The general source of conflict usually is whether or not Seki can hide his goofing off from the teacher — while implicating Yokoi inadvertently — if any of his tricks are successful, or how he handles other people who don’t know what the concept of a straight man is whenever he’s goofing off. In other words, there’s zero conflict in this manga. It’s a case of Seki and Yokoi stuck in a story where they’re instructed to make readers laugh. They made me laugh a lot in every chapter, despite the actual activity involved being so lackluster. Who knew cleaning your desk with professional tools would be hilarious?
That’s basically what Morishige’s doing at the moment — trying to come up with stories that take the most boring activity and turn them into entertainment. He succeeds gloriously.
So the story’s great, the artwork’s good — the one drawing that stands out to me is the end of () where Seki gets Yokoi in trouble, and she was just like the devil at the point, it was hilarious — and the chapters have the right length, so they don’t overextend themselves. There are only two problems with this manga. The first is whether or not Morishige can create enough entertaining scenarios with this premise. Since I watched the anime, I can confirm that this won’t be a problem. The second problem is whether or not people would want to consider buying this manga. This manga is exactly what should be on your shelves. Have fun with Seki and his Class-A goofing off techniques.
