Seriously, look it up on the Bookscan charts. It's doing amazingly for a non-Weekly Shonen Jump series without an anime to support it.
KOMI CAN'T COMMUNICATE (Komi-san wa, Komyusho desu), by Tomohito Oda. First published in 2016 and first published in North America in 2019.
PLOT:
Tadano hopes that entering an elite high school will be a chance to distance himself from his junior-high dorkiness and coast through high school largely unnoticed. That changes when he discovers that his classmate Komi isn't the stately, distant princess their class presumes her to be, but instead suffering from social anxiety so great that even the most innocuous comment is too daunting. Tadano sympathizes and promises to help her achieve her goal of making 100 friends, even if sometimes it comes at the cost of his dignity and often thanks to the misinterpretations of others.
STORY:
So what is it about Komi Can't Communicate that seems to connect with so many people? From what I can gather, it seems to be its combination of personality-driven comedy and empathetic heart.
It probably helps that social anxiety is something that both awkward manga-reading teens and those with actual anxiety disorders can relate to. It also helps that Oda takes a gentle hand with Komi. Even when her reaction is the punchline, he never takes things to the point of cruelty.
Indeed, most of the time the punchline isn't Komi's reaction to common social situations, but how others around her misinterpret her reaction. Much of the comedy comes from the extreme personalities around Komi and Tadano as they try to reach out to others. How successful this is depends a LOT on the character featured. Some are flexible and interesting enough to work well, like the genderfluid social butterfly Najimi. Others are just duds, like the easily flustered and openly, sloppily submissive Agari.
Yet there are moments of genuine sweetness between Komi and Tadano and those form the warm, beating heart of this series. This volume won me over in Chapter Five, where Tadano learns about Komi's anxieties. He reaches out to her via blackboard, and she ends up not just explaining her condition but pouring out all the words she's clearly wanted to say to someone. The two end up having a casual conversation via blackboard. The moments where Komi makes some incremental progress are legitimately sweet, and were enough to keep me reading even on the occasion that a joke didn't work.
ART:
Oda's panels tend to be small, but he makes the most of that space with charming character designs and his own particular brand of comedic timing. Oda's characters strike a good balance between attractive and comically broad, and nowhere is this more evident than in Komi hereself. She's designed as a fairly standard cool beauty, but in her anxious moment her face devolves into a wide-eyed, staring bean. Some of the other kids around her are a little more blatantly ridiculous in their looks, but they tend to work on similar principles.
As far as visual comedy, Oda tends to lean on holding on the long awkward silences, all the better to spotlight Komi's reactions (or lack thereof). It works here as those long pauses not only spotlight the gags, but help ground the lighter, broader tone of the series. It keeps things from getting too obnoxiously over-the-top.
RATING:
Komi Can't Communicate is funny and sweet in a way that feels unique, and I'm really happy that it's managed to connect to so many people entirely on the strength of its own virtues. I'm sure it will inevitably get an anime adaptation, but I would recommend giving it a look now.
This series is published by Viz. This series is ongoing in Japan with 15 volumes available. 3 volumes have been released and are currently in print.
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