The second volume of Keiichi Arawi’s madcap series, Nichijou: My Ordinary Life, unfortunately didn’t have as many belly laffs as the first book but there are definitely some really funny stories here.
The little girl professor and her robot invention, who’s now given a name: Nano, are the best strips here. Besides continuing to give Nano ever more useless additions to her body (a USB port in her toe?!), the professor’s fits are so cute. And they get a cat – Mr Sakamoto – who can of course talk and is more mature than either of them!
The funniest story was three students stuck in an elevator for so long anything makes them laugh. So they play a word game and one of them says “eggplant” and they go into hysterics – which is actually infectious! Arawi’s able to perfectly mirror the experience of cabin fever onto the reader.
There’s some mildly amusing stories like the drawing contest between an obviously talented student and one who isn’t, though the teacher praises both to the frustration of the talented student. Also, the girl who got sick but tried to put on a magic show anyway and totally failed!
Quite a few though were forgettable like the dream-fantasy sequence involving magic wooden cubes (like the one on the cover) and the fly-swatting episode. The puns story was tedious, Sasahara the faux-rich boy still isn’t funny and the Mohawk dude’s story was meh. I also think it’s a bit too early to include the pilot for the series given that we saw the reworked, and slightly better, intro in the previous book. It’s still not great – it took a few chapters for Nichijou to find its legs – but the older sister putting puzzle pieces in her sister’s cakes was comical.
This second volume is by no means bad but I’d hoped it’d be as consistently entertaining as the first one was. I still like Nichijou though and I have faith in Keiichi Arawi to deliver more great stuff in future books, particularly if his other great series, CITY, is anything to go by.
Pfft – eggplant!
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