Review: CROMARTIE HIGH SCHOOL

With it being September, it's time to take this site back to school with a month of reviews about school-related manga, starting with a very silly and satirical one.

CROMARTIE HIGH SCHOOL (Sakigake!! Kuromati Koko), by Eiji Nonoka.  First published in 2000 and first published in North America in 2005.

PLOT:

Thanks to a promise to a friend that fell through, Takashi Kamiyama finds himself the newest student at Cromartie High School, a place notorious for having the toughest student body around.  What he finds there are yankiis doing things like arguing over the importance of nicknames, a robot student that no one acknowledges is a robot, a rich boy caught up in his own ridiculous lies, a gorilla with a wristwatch and cell phone, and the mysterious man known only as Freddie.

STORY:

It's kind of a miracle that Cromartie High School works as well as it does in English, considering what it's meant to parody: the uber-manly seinen and shonen manga about tough, burly gang members that were all the rage in Japan in the 1980s and 90s.  With very few exceptions, most of those did not come out here, so the references that Nonoka slips in both visually and verbally are likely to be missed outside of the translation notes.

Thankfully, what does translate well is this series' particular brand of dryly absurd humor.  Nonoka's sense of humor is based around long build-ups that end in awkwardness as plans fall apart in discussion or stop just as t's not necessarily a laugh-out-loud style of humor, but Nonoka lends its his own particular rhythm that only gets stronger with each chapter.  As the book goes on, he gets more comfortable with adding some more outright absurdity, which is how you get things like a gorilla who is smarter than the class or a guy who looks like Freddie Mercury who never speaks, gets easily lost, but manages to unnerve everyone.  It works as a comedy, which is ultimately more important that getting references to things like Sakigake!! Otokojuku.

ART:

While the story is meant to parody yankii manga, the art is meant to parody something else: gritty, macho seinen manga from the 80s and 90s, and in particular the works of Ryoichi Ikegami.  That's why Takashi is so boyishly handsome while everyone else around him has such chiseled, rugged features - it's meant to evoke the likes of Crying Freeman or Sanctuary.  Nonoka might also be throwing some shade at him as well by making everyone so stiff, to the point that their faces seldom move even when talking.

That might just be Nonoka's style, though - there's not much liveliness to the art in general.  The humor is largely verbal instead of physical, so the images alone tend to be the punchline.  The presentation is very plain and straightforward, which actually benefits the jokes.  It's the manga equivalent of delivering a joke in a flat deadpan and Nonoka makes that take work.

PRESENTATION:


While the parody elements may be largely lost on younger manga readers, Cromartie High School is still worth reading as a great example of absurdist comedy in manga.  Even in its incomplete form, it's still worth reading.

This series was licensed by ADV Manga.  This series is complete in Japan with 17 volumes available.  12 volumes were published and are currently out of print.