In the second volume of Cute Socially Awkward Girl Who Is Too Scared To Speak But Is Bizarrely Worshipped By Everyone At Her School, Tomohito Oda leans hard on the Mulder and Scully-type relationship of Komi and Tadano. Tadano and Najimi visit Komi’s house (the first time she’s brought friends round!), we meet more kooky fellow classmates, the group goes out for ramen, and they head off on a shopping trip to find Komi a new outfit.
This lo-fi school/teen romance title is growing on me - kore wa totemo kawaii, yo (“this is very cute, you know” - I’ve been studying Japanese this past year)!
The wacky stuff like Yadano trying to beat Komi at the annual school physical or Nakanaka pretending to be a space pirate when she gets an eye infection didn’t do much for me. And the stalker girl Yamai was just bizarre but it threw in an unexpected thriller-type element into a series that is decidedly not that so I appreciated the curveball. I had no idea how Oda was going to resolve what’s actually quite a serious offence, and it was kind of a cop-out actually.
But what I like are the quieter, sweeter moments between Tadano and Komi as they edge ever closer to romance (will they? Won’t they? I’m genuinely not sure - this series might be too innocent to take it there!). Like after the Yamai episode, in the stairwell, Komi telling Tadano that he doesn’t need to be her friend, despite him leaving her obviously being the last thing she wants, or Komi waiting for Tadano to leave the library so they could share an umbrella together on the walk home (Najimi stole Tadano’s umbrella, the scamp).
Or when we see all of Komi’s photos where she’s alone, then Najimi secretly takes a photo of her with the three of them on her phone and sends it to her, and Komi asks her ma for a photo frame for it - dawww! And I like that Komi’s ma is completely unlike her.
The joke-telling episode was funny as was the clothes-shopping competition, though even in these parts I wouldn’t say they were especially gripping to read as very little beyond the situation itself happens. And the bits on Tadano’s past as an edgelord teen and Komi going for a haircut weren’t that great either.
Still, it’s a well-written/drawn and charming comic about shy kids slowly emerging from their shells, helping each other out along the way, and there are a few touching moments in there too. Komi Can’t Communicate, Volume 2 is another decent addition to the series.
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