Comic Girls – 07

「ここは天国ですか!?」 (Koko wa Tengoku Desuka!?)
“Is This Heaven!?”

Kaos had a nice episode this time around as her potential to be a far better mangaka is slowly coming into fruition by working on her confidence and artwork. With Koyume’s manga getting serialization, Kaos is the odd-one-out as the only mangaka in the house without a deal. Luckily, Kaos catches on quick to the idea of self-improvement, and instead of letting her woes consume her for the remainder of the episode, she makes small steps in the right direction towards parts of herself she’d like to work on. She goes out on her own to Akihabara, works on her drawing skills by assisting Fuura with her pages, and took it upon herself to try to look mature by getting herself reading glasses. Although she has quite some work to do to achieve her goals, it is admirable to see her pushing to change herself, acknowledging directly what she’ll have to work on to improve as a writer and artist, and find her talents start to develop as she gradually shifts into the her she always wished she could be.

Fuura is by far the best addition to Comic Girls. She’s been an absolute delight since she’s moved her belongings, skeletons, and dolls upstairs to work on her horror manga. Part of Kaos’ growth came from facing her fears of Fuura’s love of horror by sketching out some backgrounds for her with the free time she has. While Fuura still goes out of her way to get under Kaos’ skin, her efforts are shown to be productive as her encouragement for Fuura to find her niche and improve her craft comes from how close she wants to be with Kaos. Whether it’s guiding her hand along the way or showing her the early drafts of her work, Fuura genuinely feels a connection with Kaos, and wants to her to improve her self-image by getting her to work on her biggest strengths. It helps that Kaos sees the good in Fuura and her methods as she feels personally invested in making sure she’s a devoted friend to her, and her pervier side is excited about the prospect of a mature, sisterly woman like Fuura entering her personal space. When they find out that they’re both from the Tohoku region based on the kokeshi and akabeko dolls she kept around her attic room, it’s was cute to see how excited to share their personal experiences of their home town and dialect together.

Much of the top notch bonding moments came from Fuura and Kaos, but Episode 07 also sheds more light on the friendship between Nijino-sensei and Kaos’ editor Mayu. As one of the few times we aren’t seeing Mayu chewing out Kaos for her content or deadlines, we see a more normal version of her where she finds herself speechless when seeing Nijino wearing glasses, and opens up to Kaos about her own motives for wearing glasses. Finding that they can finally reach common ground was nice, and gave Kaos less guilt about wearing the reading glasses she needed for ulterior motives as Mayu had similar reasons for wanting glasses to properly watch anime despite having a harder time reading in general. By the end of the episode, Kaos had not only found ways to relate to Fuura and her editor, but also carry conversations with Koyume and Tsubasa about the anime that they mutually enjoyed. Even though she hasn’t been serialized just yet and it explains why she’s had the liberty of putting out lower quality content, Kaos’ push to shape herself into a better mangaka was enjoyable, productive, and fun to watch in this episode.

Preview