Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun 02

Hey Nozaki-kun, your 4-koma is showing.

In my post on the first episode of Nozaki-kun, I mentioned that the humor of the first episode was driven solely by Nozaki being a shoujo manga artist. To keep the gags fresh and funny, there would have to be more material poking fun at manga artists and shoujo manga. However, because Nozaki-kun targets a predominantly male audience, much of the material poking fun at shoujo would likely fall on deaf ears. With such a narrow premise and a male audience, Nozaki-kun would get old fast.

So what could this show do? Bring in more characters. But damn, if that wasn’t fast. Episode 2 runs through two characters in rapid succession, and the preview of episode 3 shows that another new character is about to pop up.

this girl should be the main character

I have to commend Nozaki-kun for sticking with the shoujo manga parody theme. I expected Mikoshiba and Seo to be introduced as main characters, and then the show would lapse into some sort of horrific shoujo parody slice of life thing – think Lucky Star with periodic forced shoujo gags. But instead, these characters were compared to the characters within Nozaki’s manga, bringing it all back to a commentary/joke about shoujo manga. This makes it easy to introduce new characters with all sorts of traits without deviating from parodying shoujo manga. Impressive!

However, this doesn’t make it interesting enough. While Nozaki-kun doesn’t seem to be turning into my worst nightmare, it still suffers from bad jokes. Specifically: Why does Mikoshiba go all embarrassed when he says something playboy-like? This kind of character trait might get a kick out of female viewers and endear them towards Mikoshiba, but for a male audience and for me in particular, it doesn’t click. It’s not funny. It’s not even interesting to me. It seems like the author can’t decide how much shoujo to put in this parody, but this is enough for me to drop the show.

P.S.: This all follows somewhat from my previous post, where I argued that Nozaki-kun shouldn’t and won’t incorporate actual shoujo elements, simply because it’s directed towards guys. Maybe I was wrong. oops