Ouran High School Host Club 7

I was a little less enthusiastic about this volume, though I did crack up at several points.  The very first chapter has a Haruhi/Kyoya focus, and Kyoya reveals more of his black heart, but there’s some slight bonding between the two as well.  Really though, the best moments were at the beginning when he woke up in the middle of a shopping mall and flashed back to remember how the other members of the club drug him out of bed and propped him up there to sleep while they ran off elsewhere, and at the end when a “lost child” message came over the PA system using Kyoya’s name, description, and saying his guardian Mr. Suoh was very worried about him.  I died laughing.

Two other parts had me laughing hard, too.  One was a story about Hunny’s brother, he reveals that he thinks that Hunny is an alien, and the reaction panel for the Club with everyone giving blank stares in the foreground and the twins giving each other a high five in the background was hilarious.  On the next page, Hunny’s brother told a story about how he got up in the middle of the night and found Hunny eating a gigantic cake, saying that Bun-Bun wanted some, and the brother was totally repulsed.

The other funny part was when the boys show up at Haruhi’s house and her dad answers the door unshaved.  They try to escape, but he grabs them and tells them not to give him their “I’ve seen the tranny in his natural state” look.  There was just something funny about that.

Mostly the funny stuff comes from spot-on delivery.  I think the comic timing is getting better and better with each volume, and I laugh at it even though I’m trying hard not to.  Establishing the characters helps too, and now that they’ve got a little bit of depth (not much, but a little), some stuff is even funnier.  Hunny’s brother being repulsed by his cake eating habits when everyone else thinks its cute is a good example, because it really IS horrible.

Hm.  The stories in the volume were all across the board, but we learn a little bit about Hunny and Mori’s brothers, and there’s a nice story about how Tamaki helped convince Hunny that being himself instead of meeting everyone else’s expectations can be a brave thing to do.  There’s a rivalry between Hunny and his brother, but it turns out not to be as severe as it first seems.  What else… there’s a side story about Hikaru and Kaoru and their favorite nanny that also sort of reveals a bit more about their twisted personalities.  The story about the meeting between Tamaki and Hunny sort of helped Tamaki’s image too, since, like I said, he’s normally depicted as a wuss.

There was another Egoistic Club story in the back of the volume.  I don’t usually like them, but it was a continuation of the last story about the weird relationship between the twisted student and teacher, so I was okay with it.