Ouran High School Host Club 17
Posted: January 16, 2013 Filed under: Ouran High School Host Club Leave a comment »Bisco Hatori – Viz – 2011 – 18 volumes
This used to be one of my favorites, but a combination of the English version being caught up and spoiling myself silly on the ending means I haven’t read this in a long time. Dipping back in, I was struck by how… crazy this series is. There’s a lot going on, and this volume was mostly a talking volume. Lots of characters, lots of plot threads, lots of yelling, and the layouts and flow are a bit cluttered. It took me a long time to get into this one, and maybe that was part of it.
All of that pales in comparison to how awesome Tamaki is, though, and he makes reading this series worth it. That and the crazy sense of humor and the way the characters play off of one another for gags. It’s not the absolute best, but it’s still a great read for that reason.
Unfortunately, this volume has none of that in favor of a rather dark storyline to climax the series with. No Tamaki being silly, not a whole lot of jokes, and even the Host Club is disbanded. I actually started this volume and stopped several times, because I just couldn’t bring myself to slog through the dark and depressing stuff when the funny is what this series is good at.
Again, I like the series as a whole pretty well, this just wasn’t my favorite volume, and it was a bad one to come back on after a break. The good news is that there’s a volume after this, and all the dark stuff is taken care of at the end of this volume. I’m not even really sure what’s going to happen in the last volume, since it seems like there’s about a chapter’s worth of material left. But perhaps we’ll be seeing a lot of resolution for each character, and there’s a lot of main characters.
I am looking forward to more of the light and funny stuff this series does, so here’s hoping the next volume will end the series on a high note.
