Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A brilliant and holarious read!, 29 Feb 2008
This manga is a classic manga with a quirky spin, you have your well known, japanese high school romantic comedy, and this is by far the best one in terms of comedy. School rumble has wonderful characters that you can fall in love with or completely relate to straight away! The artwork is magnificent, and these mangas are giggle infested! Although, sometimes the plotline can be a bit difficult to follow, you need just go a bit slower, and you'll flot by, laughing all the way =D
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4.0 out of 5 stars
A flawed diamond, still well worth reading., 2 May 2009
This manga has a high-school comedy romance theme, involving a variety of characters falling in and out of love, often undeclared and unreciprocated, against a background of typical high-school life interspersed with wilder episodes including some supernatural elements.
The characters are all well drawn and can easily be told apart from each other visually. There is no real fanservice or erotic situations and it can be read by anyone over 12 years old without worry. The dramatic situations are generally amusing though there are some more serious tones in some of the relationships between characters.
Sometimes the uneven flow of time and a lack of background exposition makes it hard to know exactly what is going on from chapter to chapter. This problem arises because the original publication was in a series of weekly episodes, which gave the reader psychological distance between one story and the next. When collected into a book, the next episode, which can be read immediately, often doesn't follow quickly and logically.
The main weakness of the series are firstly that the two supposed lead characters are actually the dullest and weakest in personality. The male romantic lead in particular is a faceless automaton for whom it is impossible to feel any sense of sympathy. It's some of the supporting characters who actually carry a lot of the story and are worth following.
The second flaw is that there are simply too many characters, and more are introduced as the series continues. Again, this makes it hard to care about all of the characters, so the side stories involving minor characters outside the core group can be annoying interruptions to the main story. Which is a shame, since they are all people (in a sense) and deserve to have their stories properly told if they are worth telling.
It is too early to know if the series will come to a satisfactory conclusion. As a high school story, the natural lifespan is two school years, after which everyone will presumably graduate and got to university or a job. In the books, the school year grinds on, but in real life the author is no doubt under pressure to continue the series as long as it remains popular.
On balance, if you enjoy a light-hearted kind of manga, with the emphasis on comedy, you won't go far wrong with School Rumble. Its flaws are forgiveable thanks to its good qualities.
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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Too hard to follow to really get into, 11 Nov 2007
Right, first things first, I watched the anime this is based on first before reading the manga but the anime is vastly superior.
This manga, while funny and quirky at times, is exceptionally hard to follow. The relationships of some of the characters are difficult to really understand, there are too many in-jokes, too many little side notes and footnotes which are hard to follow. It's a real shame because the anime is really funny and after watching that, I searched for the book and the enjoyment after book 3 waned tremednously so I've not bought book 4 onwards.
If you're interested in it, you will definitely need to start with Book 1, as you should theoretically, but be warned, it's going to give you a bit of headache keeping up with it :(
A shame as it could have been really good. Instead, it's almost as if the artist wasn't given enough space or pages to do the stories properly.
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by Jin Kobayashi
by Jin Kobayashi
by Jin Kobayashi
by Jin Kobayashi
by Jin Kobayashi
See all Product Description
![School Rumble: Season One [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61riaJil8rL._SL75_SS50_.jpg)
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