I thought I had the complete set of this, then got to the end of Vol 3 and realized that nope, I was wrong. There’s a Volume 4. Though I’m fairly certain (having bothered to actually look it up) that it’s the last one.
This is a collection of 4-koma comics about a class of high school girls. There’s Chiyo, the eternally cheerful child genius, Sakaki, who’s very serious and in love with cute things, which hate her, Osaka, who is basically Orihime’s long lost twin, Tomo, who has enough energy and competitive spirit to make up for her lack of intellect, Kagura, who sees herself as Sakaki’s rival, and Yomi, who mostly seems to wish she had saner friends. They are supposedly watched over by their homeroom teacher, Yukari, but even Chiyo, who’s 10, is more of a grown up than Yukari. Yukari, in turn, is watched over by her fellow teacher and former classmate, Nyamo. Like Yomi, Nyamo seems to wish she had saner friends.
There is nothing here that resembles an ongoing plot. There are some storylines that last several pages (about 5-8 strips each) and some recurring themes, such as school events, Osaka’s obsession with Chiyo’s pigtails (her imagination is rather fertile there), Yukari’s moving herself into Nyamo’s apartment, and Sakaki’s determination to finally pet a cute furry thing, but these elements tend to appear and then disappear just as quickly.
It starts out straight gags and never loses them, but the characters and their friendships slowly develop into something familiar. I especially like that several of the girls are academically successful, and that it isn’t treated as unusual (there are reactions to Chiyo’s being smarter than the rest, but that has more to do with the fact that she’s five years younger than them, not her actual grades) instead of the standard trope of one girl being smart and all the others being awed and/or jealous. I suspect some may be put off by some of the breast size jokes, but after years of reading Samurai Deeper Kyo and watching Blue Seed and Slayers (among others) those tend to bounce off of me in anime and manga unless they’re particularly bothersome. I was, however, very annoyed with the perverted teacher obsessed with ogling high school girls. One of a few anime/manga standards I could do without. One particularly interesting thing is that I see icons from this series a lot, and the mangaka’s artstyle made the original art for the icons easier to spot than it is in most manga. Actually, come to think of it, there are some Chiyo text icons I’ve seen around where I always thought the character in them was a chibi version of an older character…
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