Warning! This contains a bit of fan-service. A bit. A girl can probably stand it.
To start it off, this is a slice-of-life comedy manga that can either make you look at women differently. Your opinion about girls being all tidy and neat might be destroyed so if you don't want to see the ugly side of a girl, then do not read this. If you want to laugh out loud about the facts of the girl-life, then please, do so.
High School Girls Volume 1: (by Towa Oshima) is the story of the mangaka's real life experience told in a different but funny way. There are three girls (Eriko, Yuma & Ayano) who are applying for an all-girls high school. Excited, they went to school early to investigate. They found out that their future school is not what they imagined it to be. Filthy is the last word to be listed down as a description for the swim team's locker room in which they stumbled upon. They soon learn about the horrors that any girl should not hear about: swimming while on their period, lesbians (due to the fact that boys are nowhere to be seen), pubic hair trimmings, girls hating on each other, etc. It's a wilderness inside a high school!
Art: Even though it's consider a shoujo manga, it is definitely feels like it was drawn for the shounen audience. It's cartoon-ish and comical but anatomical correct. For a slice-of-life comedy manga, I really like the art. It's not flashy, it's not filling out anything, it's not pretending to be anything it isn't. It's comedy.
Censored! Yes, I'm evil!
Panels: This is not the typical size for the usual U.S. published manga (5.2 x 7.5 in.) but probably closer to the original tankobon size in Japan. The panels don't have extra white space and is really jam-packed with content. They used a nice mix of free-flowing panels with box panels and overlaping panels. It doesn't tire the eyes with rectangles everywhere. Some frames show actions in detail while others skip the details. Personally, I like these kind of frames where only the needed details (details which are hard to explain without the help of images) are selected for each frame. The movements are still expressed without much panels to use.
Story: They story is unique where it only tells the readers about the terrifying world girls live in. I can appreciate what girls do just to keep their beauty in check. Also, there are a lot of period jokes and comical moments that only those who were taught about them get it (ie. the difference of using a tampon and a pad. [Sorry, I did not want to use that but that's the only thing in my mind as I laugh my butt off.])
The punchline is in the next page but I ain't gonna spoil it because it's funny. Seriously.
The style the story is written in is harsh but funny. You get your laugh off but then you realize that this might be happening right now. Anyway, the audience is kind of blurry. For me, I think this tries to cater to both girls and boys. Girls: because it's the telling of the author's experience. Boys: Fan-service (which is not intended as fan service) and educational (reader's get to dive inside a girl's world.)
Characters: You have the three girls and one insider (students who were studying at the same campus in junior high transferred into their senior high division) named Kouda, all are in the same class and are struggling to make high school life memorable. The three are sort of naive entering an all-girls high school, especially Eriko. She has a preconceived notion that girls in an all-girls school are all well bred princesses while the other two know that without guys, girls will become just like guys; beasts. These characters are definitely based off of real people because these girls are so natural and are only exaggerated as to make them funny. They feel like real people you would meet (*cough*Mean Girls*cough*) everywhere.
This is not a guy's locker room, but the swim team's locker. Trimmings are in the next page. Literally.
Bottomline: Depends. Read it if you want something funny and real like a stand-up comedy act. Give it a try is you want to read something different but is still light enough to read. For me, it took a lot of self-convincing to finish it. I laughed at the jokes but it was something I'm not really into. At first I was turned off because I got numb to comedy (watching too much stand up comedy online and anime) and I didn't feel like reading it. Then I got bored of the things I'm currently reading so I decided to finish it. I'm satisfied and I have enough determination now to finish all the 5 volumes I have.
Thanks for reading this review! Please leave a comment if you want something to be reviewed! I will review a popular manga series soon so watch out for that!
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