School Rumble

Genre manga Author Jin Kobayashi Publisher Del Rey Manga External Links Official School Rumble Website

Jin Kobayashi's School Rumble is the story of a high school love triangle-except that none of the characters know that it's a love triangle. It's over the top, dramatically funny, and the narration let's you know that you're in the minds of high school students. All of the stereotypes are there: the ditz, the rebel, the stoic. To them, everything is life or death, and everything is the pivot on which life turns, even something as simple as random seat assignments. In high school? This will ring painfully true. Past high school? It will still ring painfully true.

Unlike most manga, which are composed of three chapters, Kobayashi has divided this one up into 18 different sections, all of which are under 20 pages, and have titles that are puns or plays on cultural references. The more culturally informed you are, the funnier this manga is. Each chapter is a complete anecdote, and all of them are tied together by the characters, the overarching love story, and the absurdity of the situations. This volume has everything you could want from a manga: violence, pointless insinuated nudity, comedy, irony, and love, along with plenty of cute schoolgirls. Yet the story isn't completely funny; there's the occasional serious moments when the characters reach epiphanies, and due to the nature of the rest of the story, these moments have all the more power.

There are some things to watch for as the manga progresses. To the side of many pages are little notes that do a plethora of functions. Occasionally they'll point out character qualities, be plot explanations, or are just little side-points of interest. They should be noticed (though at times that's hard) as some of them come up in later dialogue. Nothing essential is missed without these little distractions, but they enhance the story. In the back of this volume there are 12 pages devoted to explaining the Japanese cultural references that are left in. While this was done to preserve the original story, flipping back and forth between the story and the back of the book is distracting for the average western reader. Still, such actions are necessary to understand things such as why one character dresses up as a turtle before going out in the rain.

The greatest part of Kobayashi's manga is the juxtaposition of characters. The similarities and differences of the characters are celebrated, and shown in such a way that the reader can't help but laugh. It's smart, funny, and well-thought out. School Rumble is high school just the way it was for every reader: insanely serious to the characters, and insanely funny to everyone else.