Lovely Complex 11

I had a serious moral dilemma on my hands for the title here, for whatever reason.  LoveCom, Love (star) Com, or Lovely Complex?  The latter seemed like the least confusing, even though that’s not really what it’s called.  I’ll just pretend.

I’d heard a lot of great things about this series, so I was pretty sure I was going to like it.  I was quite pleased with how easy it was to get into, too.  I mean, if you brush off the first ten volumes as “they’re best friends, she likes him, they try to hook up, it doesn’t work, they keep trying, then they hook up, break up, get back together” it’s actually no sweat to figure out the dynamics between all the characters.  It helps that this volume is mostly focused on Nobu, Risa’s best friend, and how she’s moving to Hokkaido with her grandma.  Apparently she and her boyfriend “Baby” are a star couple, so the volume mostly deals with how the two of them are taking it (while each is pretending to take it well) what Nobu means to Risa, how much Nobu wants to go, et cetera.

There’s also the matter of her boyfriend Atsushi’s entrance exams.  There’s some time spent on this at the end of the volume.  Seeing this series in action… I have to say, I didn’t pick it up initially because I wasn’t entirely convinced that the whole “tall girl short boy” dynamic that it was based on was going to work, but I can see how there might be a lot of novelty in that.  In this volume, Atsushi meets Risa’s family, who are all a lot taller than her, which is pretty cute.

I also liked the joking dynamic between Risa and Atsushi.  I wasn’t sure what was going on at first, then I remembered that they were supposed to be acting out comedy routines (or something) together, so when I looked at the bad jokes as just part of their personality and not some sort of manga-only activity, they made a lot more sense and I liked the characters a bit more because of it.

I’ll probably go back and read up on this series.  I can tell it’s quite good, and I’ll probably enjoy it immensely from the beginning.  It’s definitely towards the top of the heap as far as the shoujo series I’ve been sampling lately go, and I’m curious to see where else it will go from here.  Apparently it’s 17 volumes long, and this volume makes up entrance exams… I can’t imagine the second half of the school year will take up another six volumes.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.