Comic Girls – 03

「プニプニポヨンですね」 (Puni Puni Poyon Desu ne)
“Jiggle Jiggle Bounce”

This week’s Comic Girls ponders the hard-hitting question of whether slender or extra thicc is what fills one’s heart. And with Kaos on the sidelines, she must not only come to find an answer good enough for Koyume and Rukki, but find a way to incorporate anything she’s learned up to this point for her own benefit.

One thing I keep asking myself as Kaos’ ideas are shot down one-by-one is how she was able to get a manga released to begin with. From her editor’s pickiness, it’d be hard to see any of Kaos’ ideas or chapters being good enough to be released. There are some shows where ideas from authors/mangaka are shot down yet there’s still some leeway because their bad ideas have little impact on the success they have, but Kaos’ success is hard to pinpoint. You would think she’d be able to skate by, but her layout for the chapter where she has her characters try crepes is as abysmal as her roommates and her editor suggests, and makes me question how it was possible for her to not arrive on the chopping block at a quicker pace. This could be something that she has to face at some point, but for how fundamentally flawed Kaos is portrayed and seen as, her editor and the manga company she works for sure are giving her plenty of chances.

This is given a clearer focus when her roommates pick at some of the reasons why her latest chapter was poorly received. Much of these reasons factor in on each of her roommate’s larger strengths with Koyume finding that in comparison to the shoujo manga she draws, Kaos’ taste in fashion and clothing is appalling and too honed in on her own experience wearing her grandmother’s hand-made clothes for ages. Similarly, Rukki’s ecchi leanings found the character’s reaction to getting whipped cream on her chest to be awkwardly unnatural. Although the show hones in on why her manga is bad, the difficulty in focusing on why it’s good is something that it grapples with as they are unsure how good her manga should be. By the end of the episode, Kaos learns to just make the massive crepes chibi and anthropomorphic after realizing she can’t draw food to look good, but not before starving herself into an illness as self-inflicted punishment for not drawing well. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but Kaos comes off like such a lost cause that you have to look very closely to see what appeal there is in her work.

But the highlight of the episode is definitely the sketching that Rukki has to do in order to get better practice on how to draw her character models. Having Koyume as her model for the voluptuous characters in her manga adds to this show’s fanservice element, yet also gives Kaos a chance to improve her character models since one of the criticisms she received was how formless and samey her character designs are. There is also a chest war in the midst of all of this as they are all unhappy with their body shapes in different ways as Koyume wants to be slender, Rukki wants to be thicc, and Tsubasa wants to be muscle-bound like her heroes despite being the in-between the other three yearn for. It offered a nice break from how much attention Kaos had received in comparison to the rest, though it was still funny to see the fanservicey scenes, how Kaos reacts with some perverted thoughts set aside, and how excited Rukki was when playing dress-up with Kaos. It’s still a funny and comforting series to watch and get caught up in, and despite Kaos’ flaws, there’s certainly enough substance and content to keep you coming back for more.

Preview