“Are we cursed to meet only when you look like a guy?” Hagi to Kohaku

How would you react if you were invited to a mixer by your (female) uni classmate only to find, when you and your two friends turn up, that three ‘hot guys’ are waiting to greet you? Except, of course, it’s Suo and her two (female) friends who work part-time at a cross-dressing bar – and they’re still in costume. Tokiwa, Asagi and Hagi uneasily settle down to spend the evening with Suo, Fuji and Kohaku. And when Suo suggests playing the King Game to lighten the mood, adding mischievously, “How about the chosen numbers have to kiss?” the young men become even more uneasy. But as the evening winds to an end, she sends them a text with an image (which we don’t get to see) that says, ‘Sorry for surprising you. Here’s how we normally look’ – and suddenly the three men are all, “They’re actually pretty!”

And then there’s the time in the lecture theatre when Suo appears in male disguise and plants herself next to Tokiwa, to his embarrassment. She explains that she’s off to work immediately afterward, so there’s no time to change – but delights in winding him up and exciting admiration for the mysterious ‘SSR prince’ from other female students.

Fuji then asks to meet up with Asagi (whom his friends describe as ‘like a clueless old granpa’). She wants him to help her with an ‘action romance’ manga she’s drawing by posing for some photos that she can use as reference. It’s really a doujin and the contents will almost certainly be R18+ but ditsy Asagi doesn’t understand and is only too happy to help, exclaiming delightedly, “My hand is going to become manga!”

Meanwhile, Hagi is getting fed up, insisting, “Next it should be me and Kohaku’s turn. But nothing’s happened!” But then he encounters the distant (and somewhat tsundere) Kohaku who’s been caught in a sudden downpour and is soaked through. He offers her his jacket to cover up – but how will she react?

But the real clincher comes when Suo agrees to meet up with Tokiwa out of costume – and he doesn’t immediately recognise her when she’s not being ‘the prince’. Does she have feelings for him? If they continue to hang out together, will rumours spread, passed around by the prince’s jealous female supporters?

How I Attended an All-Guys’ Mixer will probably attract readers because of the anime adaptation (shown on HIDIVE earlier this year) and Manga UP! Global have already been publishing Nana Aokawa’s manga digitally a chapter at a time. Told in short chapters, it’s close in spirit to yon-koma manga like Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun, with much of the humour here focusing on the three men’s awkwardness around the three cross-dressing young women who seem to prefer ‘being’ men to being themselves. But because of this snapshot story-telling technique, we go from the initial mixer to the karaoke bar to the games arcade, eventually in Chapter 6 visiting the three girls at their place of part-time work, the cross-dressing bar, to see them working with their customers, mixing cocktails, and chatting.

Nana Aokawa’s character art works best for me in chibi and profile; those full-face images on the cover art (and in the manga itself) are strangely moon-like and work best when characterized with sweat drops, irritation marks etc.

The translation is credited to CCC International LLC. It’s not the same one as used by Manga UP! and having compared the two, I think I prefer the digital version as this one is oddly stilted in places. A comedy manga really needs to have a certain lightness of touch in the words as well as the images and while this version isn’t bad (except for a few places where words are missing in the speech bubbles) it doesn’t flow as naturally as it could. That being said, this Panini Manga paperback edition comes in an attractive shiny cover with French flaps and a colour page at the start, which is always good, although there are no extras or translation notes (the occasional explanation like ‘SSR’ is dealt with in the panel itself.

This is the first of Nana Aokawa’s manga to get an English publication and the ongoing manga (9 volumes in Japan) regularly appears in Square Enix’s Gangan Comics Online. Volume 2 will be available in November with #3 following in January.

Much of the humour is based on the three men’s embarrassment at being forced to hang out with three other ‘men’ as the girls appear to casual viewers or bar staff. Complaints of “I’m not into guys’ are heard which sometimes brings the ‘humour’ into potentially tricky territory. Disbelief has to be suspended too, because it would take quite a lot of skill on the girls’ part to lower their voices convincingly etc. etc. But at a light romcom level, it’s an entertaining and fun read.

Our review copy from Panini was supplied by Turnaround Comics (Turnaround Publisher Services).