My Heavenly Hockey Club 1
Posted: June 17, 2007 Filed under: My Heavenly Hockey Club 10 Comments »Ai Morinaga is one of those mangaka that I think deserves a high five. Her and Moyoko Anno both. Unfortunately, Morinaga’s two other series in English are unfinished, but here’s hoping we see the end of this one. She’s one of the few people that can make me laugh HARD when I read any one of her volumes. I assure you, they are all awesome, but since this is the first one I’ve had since… 2004, I guess, it’s hard to judge it objectively against the other two series that are available.
This one doesn’t disappoint. It’s hilarious, and as I may have mentioned before, it’s hard to get me to genuinely like humor manga (I laugh quite a bit at Jojo too, but I don’t know if that counts). Both the plot and the characters are hilarious, and there’s no one-trick pony involved in its jokes. Absolutely everything is hilarious. The plot is basically that this group of rich boys decide to start a Field Hockey team, except none of them know how to play field hockey, and they all like to travel. Since there are no teams locally to play against, this means picking a spot randomly on the map and calling up a team there for a match. This usually doesn’t work out that well, but they get a lot of hot springs visits in.
There are some miscellaneous background characters, including a glasses-wearing team manager, a pair of twins that place no value on their individual names, and maybe some others I’m forgetting about, but there’s really just the main girl and main boy. The girl studied really, really hard to get into this high school because it’s 300 meters from her house and it means she can sleep more since she can get up later and get home earlier to take a nap. Unfortunately, on the way there her first day, she gets hit by the car of the main boy, who drafts her onto the Hockey team instead of making her pay for damages. She doesn’t like this since it involves morning practice. Apparently, he likes her, but they’re both such WEIRD people there’s not the normal romance you’d get in a shoujo manga. This is a Morinaga romance, which is hilarious and dysfunctional.
The main girl, Hana, just does not like this Field Hockey business at all, but can’t think of a way out of paying for the car. Throughout the course of this volume, her most pressing concerns seem to be succumbing to extreme bouts of narcolepsy and chastising the various club members for trying to drag her into their rich boy way of life. The more-or-less-one-shot chapters are, needless to say, insane. Two practice matches are attempted and one side vacation is taken. There are bears, cheesecake, monkeys, helicopters, and train v. helicopter wars involved.
It’s VERY FUNNY. It’s hard to adequately describe how awesome this series is. Get it if you want a good laugh. This is not a sports manga, and it’s all the better for pretending to be.
I totally agree — Ai Morinaga always, ALWAYS makes me laugh out loud. Her stories are always hilarious and incredibly light-hearted.
About Your and My Secret… I recently found this article confirming that Tokyopop will release Your and My Secret (under the original name: Boku to Kanojo XXX) in 2008!!
:D Just spreading the Morinaga love!
I heard about that! I was so pumped, I think they made that announcement a couple days after I posted this. I think it’s up to 6 or 7 volumes in Japan now, so we’ve got plenty to catch up on. I’m really looking forward to it.
And I’m glad someone else enjoys Morinaga as much as I do. I’m so sad I can’t read more, like Yamada Taro Monogatari… or even the end of Duck Prince ^_^;
I was not much impressed by volume 1. It’s kinda average shojo title with cute but unmemorable boys. And that pair of twins? Where did I see them? Sorry, no more volumes for me. Probably.
It’s true that the characters are almost totally faceless save for the main pair… and not even so much the boy. I love the humor, and I’ll stand by it, but I’m getting a little tired of it after four volumes. There’s been some fun character development stories, but I still can’t remember the names of anyone except Hana. I need more than humor for a series that’s going to be more than 2-3 volumes long… I need good characters or a plot. I still like it okay, but I’m hoping more stuff happens within the next volume or so.
I guess I like older shojo titles more than new.. there seems to be more soul in them.. for example, I don’t see Please Save My Earth or Here Is Greenwood on your page and I can totally recommend them. PSME is very long but I’m a sucker for past lives stories.. with a little bit of touch of sci-fi.. ^_^
I tried to pick up Here is Greenwood, but it seems to be going out of print, because the availability of some volumes is very spotty.
How classic do you like your shoujo? CMX publishes some really retro stuff. From Eroica With Love, Swan, and Moon Child are all of a 70s-80s vintage, and are among my favorite series (Eroica is one of my absolute favorite series running at the moment). Cipher, Seimaiden, and Pieces of a Spiral are of 80s-90s vintage, but I haven’t read any of those ones, though Cipher is probably next up on my list.
Bride of Deimos is also fantastic, but it’s not finished in English and is probably long out of print. It’s a gothic horror-kinda series, I’m hoping that the sequel series (or “final chapter,” it was also unfinished in Japan) running at the moment will spark more interest and give it a second chance.
Well, I don’t have that many classic shojo series. For me, To Terra… probably stands on the highest piedestal. From what you mentioned, I have several Moon Child and Pieces of a Spiral volumes ordered. I heard Eroica was good but as a man I don’t feel that attracted to the story.. ;-) I have every Here is Greenwood volume except one (some bought on justmanga and some on discountanimedvd) that I couldn’t get. I bought it after reading the first volume that was really hilarious. I simply adored the humor of this series.
Also, my order of Netcomics books arrived a few days ago with some volumes of shojo manhwa series you reviewed here (like Dokebi Bride or Land of Silver Rain) so now I’m gonna read this… but it will take some time.. most of it I’ll probably save for long cold winter days… ;-)
Dokebi Bride is very good, though some of the more recent volumes are taking the series in kind of a weird direction. It’s still good, though.
Land of Silver Rain has one of the best first volumes I’ve ever read, and the second volume is good, the middle part of the series is really tedious and disappointing, followed up by a really great ending in volumes 6-7. It’s kind of weird how good and bad it can be at the same time, but it’s worth reading.
How can you review “My Heavenly Hockey Club” and not mention that it’s an obvious and intentional parody of “Ouran High School Host Club”? Hana is a girl surrounded by rich pretty boys because of an accident that leads her to believe that she owes them money (she doesn’t, Izumi {the “main boy} only said that to rope her in). She is forced to dress like a boy during their few “games” because, well, she’s on an all-boys field hockey team. Izumi is as clueless and as lost in his own rich-boy world as Tamaki of “Host Club” is, but he is notably indifferent to “commoner practices.” Hana is as unimpressed with luxury as her Host-club equivalent is (‘cept for food). Everything is there partially to poke fun at Ouran and put it on its head–the main boy could care less about commoners, the main girl is lazy and unacademic, the twins seem to just exist without any personality whatsoever. “Hockey Club” is a parody of a parody of the entire Shojo manga genre. It aint original, but it’s pretty funny:)
It was easy, I hadn’t read Ouran before I read this. I talk about it a little in the review I did for Ouran, though. I love it for being a parody of a parody, but I think it succeeds better at parody than Ouran… I didn’t really care for Ouran until the story got going more in volume five or six.
It’s hard not to think of the two together given all the similarities, but the timing is really weird. I think My Heavenly Hockey Club started only a year or so after Ouran, if I remember right from when I looked it up. At that point, Ouran would have had only one or two volumes available, and it seems weird that it would have been famous enough to parody like this. I could be wrong about the timing, though.