A lighthearted comedy involving elementary school kids.
4 Volumes (Complete)






This manga is in an oversaturated genre, and unfortunately, can't quite hold it's own. Setting aside the eerily off-putting artstyle, the comedy itself leaves much to be desired. It's rare you'll get a chuckle out of it, and the idea of anyone audibly laughing at this is simply inconceivable. It's not funny, it's not interesting, and it's not pleasant to look at. Ask yourself: Why bother?
A few chapters into this I knew I was going to love it. As an earlier reviewer said, many of the jokes make me think "that could totally have happened when I was a kid." The characters are cute as can be, easy to tell apart, interesting, and, above all, nice. There is an almost complete absence of the routine meanness that is common in school life manga. At the same time, the kids are often shown screwing up in weird ways -- just like you would expect 3rd grade kids to do. These events are always funny, and sometime hilarious. I wish I'd grown up with kids like this.
I wholly agree that some of the jokes fall pretty flat. I can only assume those work better if you've actually been a kid in Japanese grade school. But most of it works fine regardless of where you grew up.
I've never thought it was all that cute, though. The appeal (for me) is more like "ha ha, that could totally have happened when I was a kid". (Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and we had to fight hordes of raptors on the way to school. In the snow. Uphill, both ways.)
Somewhat like "Yotsuba to!" with less "universal" jokes. Some of the humor is rather random but overall it's an excellent series. Has me laughing out loud quite a bit.
The only problem this series has is that some of the humor relies heavily on the japanese language, with a number of jokes falling flat if you aren't at least clued in to what's going on. Other than that, this is a must read.
This is definitely an odd manga, and probably not for everyone. I can see the humor, I just didn't like it. The eccentricity was definitely lost on me.