GRAND BLUE DREAMING (Guranburu), written by Kenji Inoue & art by Kimitake Yoshioka. First published in 2014 and first published in North America in 2018.
PLOT:
Iori hoped that with the move to college and his uncle's seaside dive shop, he would be able to finally meet some girls and start enjoying his youth. Instead, he finds himself shanghai'd by the college diving club. They spend most of their time drinking and stripping, and more often than not Iori ends up getting dragged into it. Will ever learn to actually dive and maybe even impress his pretty cousins in the process?
STORY:
Reading Grand Blue Dreaming is like watching the Poochie episode of The Simpsons. Instead of wondering when Poochie's going to get to the fireworks factory, though, you wonder when Grand Blue Dreaming is going to get to the actual plot.
It's pretty easy to pin down what the ultimate point of this series is within the first few pages. Iori wants a girlfriend, but in the end he'll fall in love with the ocean and the whole thing will be about the friendships he made along the way. So why is it then that this first volume spends so much time on drunken hazing? You expect some degree of drunken partying in this sort of college coming-of-age story, but here it takes up 3/4ths of this first volume. That wouldn't be so bad if the guys Iori partied with were fun or interesting in their own right, but save for the token otaku they're all the same interchangable sort of loud, obnoxious bro.
Grand Blue Dreaming expects your patience on a lot of things. It expects your patience for random nudity to be endless, as Inoue likes to spam that joke constantly. It expects you to tolerate the fact that both of Iori's love interests are his cousins: one who is sweet, large-breasted, and has a sister complex that is mentioned once and never again; the other sarcastic, small-breasted, and more of a tsundere. It expects you to wait for the last chapter to actually see the club do something other than party, but its attempts to bring you the diving action, friendship, and love for the ocean, but its efforts are far too late for any sensible reader to care.
ART:
This book is full of fanservice...so long as you consider lots of images of naked, relatively buff college-aged guys 'fanservice.' Yoshioka is actually a pretty talented artist, and his fondness for exaggerated gonk faces speaks of a man who is likely just as influenced by Akira Hiramoto (of Prison School fame) as he was by Hideaki Sorachi (of Gintama fame). Beyond that, it's hard to say much about him because everything else, if simply because it's overshadowed by the constant repetition of the first two parts. We don't even get to see much of the oceanside scenery of the wonders of the deep (outside of an aquarium). This artist is kind of wasted on this story.
RATING:
Grand Blue Dreaming is a grand bore. It repeats lame jokes constantly while forgetting to build up its case, much less any sort of emotional core. It's not funny, it's not sincere, it's just....there, wasting time.
This series is published by Kodansha Comics. This series is ongoing in Japan with 12 volumes available. 3 volumes have been published and are currently in print.
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