School Rumble

Review Date: 2007 September 11 10:08

Reviewed by: Azure

Released by: Tanoshimi

Publishing Country: UK

Author: Jin Kobayashi

Age Rating: 13+

Page Count: 208

ISBN-13: 978009950665

ISBN-10: 99506653

Summary

The school athletics fair descends upon the school, what is supposed to be a day of fun turns into all out war as class 2-C and class 2-D use it as the next battlefield for their war. Can Eri and Harmima get over their mutual grudge and help their class triumph?

Review

The focus of this volume of School Rumble is the athletics fair, the story has been building up to it for a while so it's nice that things finally get going. Though it typical School Rumble style it isn't long before things escalate. Word gets around about the beautiful nurse Anegasaki Tae, and soon the male population of the school is promising to have a lot of accidents so that she can patch them up. With the battle between the two classes heating up this doesn't seem to be too much of a problem. The big event of the festival is the Knight's battle, in which two guys have to act as a horse whilst carrying a knight played by a girl. The teams then have to knock as many knights off opposing teams horses as possible, the last standing knight/horse team is the winner. Surface to say, 2-C and 2-D take it very seriously. The volume is then filled out with a couple of shorter sillier stories which include Harima's underling problem, some body swapping and adults chugging down cast quantities of alcohol.

This volume of School Rumble sees the most continuous stretch of story yet, the sports day takes up a large chunk of the volume. It means that the pace really picks up and gives the opportunity for many members of the extensive cast to appear. Since Tenma isn't very good at sports Kenji tends to dominate, the story provides a great opportunity for him to argue a lot with angry girl Eri, who is slowly starting to move away from being an Evagelion Asuka clone as she starts to consider other people's feelings a bit more.

School Rumble is still funny at volume 6, but the relationships between the characters are moving incredibly slowly. It's really about time someone got together, even if only for a little bit. What School Rumble excels at is generating a massive cast of insane yet loveable characters and a massive feeling of suspense.

Rating: 7/10

Notes

Interestingly the back blurb also mentions that School Rumble is out on DVD from FUNimation. Is this a carry over from the US print, or an indication that the series will head to the UK?