My Heavenly Hockey Club 6

You know, I keep reading this series hoping for plot development.  It’s still funny, but every time I get another volume with no plot development, I get more and more disillusioned.  But it’s hard to stay mad at a series that can make me laugh so hard.  The laughs were intermittent in this volume, but they were still laughs, and it’s hard to get me to laugh at something like this.

I loved the first chapter, which introduced a student advisor for the Hockey Club.  Of course he’s ostentatious and annoying, and a very poor match for the boys.  This may have been bad had the chapter not consisted entirely of the teacher doing insane things with a page of disturbed reaction shots from the boys and/or Hana.  I mean, there was some dialogue, and a little bit of a plot thrown in at the end,  but mostly it was just a litany of weirder and weirder things from the teacher and weirder and weirder faces from the club.  They were making keba! faces.  It was absolutely brilliant.

The other thing that made me laugh was towards the end of the book.  There’s one story about a reformed yaoi fangirl who ungeeked herself in order to snag Izumi.  She can’t help but secretly think yaoi fangirl thoughts, so all manner of slashy things happen throughout the chapter, which she tries her hardest to ignore.  At the very end, we get a perfect cupcake shot of Izumi sans shirt with pants undone and loose around his waist, and the girl has an explosive nosebleed which splatters all over herself, Izumi, and the walls in a wonderfully convincing splatter pattern.  It’s not a sight gag, as Izumi comments on the disgusting nature of what just occurred and the glasses co-captain rushes in to help wipe Izumi off.  A lot of the yaoi fangirl jokes were falling a little flat throughout the chapter (it’s hard to top Flower of Life when it comes to that), but that nosebleed had me laughing hard in the back room at work today.

Let’s see, what else?  One chapter features a game of kokkuri-san, or Ouija.  The board is in Japanese, but the Japanese syllables have been translated into English.  I’ve never actually looked at a table of Japanese letters without the Japanese letters, only the sounds.  It looks a lot like the Periodic Table somehow.  We also very nearly get a kiss between Hana and Izumi in this chapter, but alas.

The afterword is a lengthy discussion of the size of nipples vs. areola size.  Very little in the way of context is provided, other than the original subject was a large nipple on a drawing of Izumi.

There are also occasionally very funny gags throughout the other chapters.  I’m getting increasingly more frustrated with the lack of plot in this series, but I just can’t stay mad at Ai Morinaga.