Old favorites and new abound in this latest volume
Creative Staff
Story/Art: Takuma Morishige
Translation: Yoshito Hinton
What They Say
The high-school hijinks continue in volume 7 of My Neighbor Seki!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
For the first chapter this time around, Seki plays with a yo-yo, but the game actually revolves around naming the trick that he’s created. It’s nothing too special, though Yokoi’s imagery helps to spice things up a little. Next up comes a story about creating thin wood shavings of all things, which is amusing due to Yokoi ending up thoroughly uninterested for once, making for a nice contrast. The one following is a pretty forgettable tale centered around Seki creating a makeshift haunted house, which feels surprisingly generic.
Fortunately, though, things turn around once more as the robot family returns. The story this time revolves around the son trying to adopt a (comparatively massive) robot dog. There are some really nice twists here, with the way Seki is forced to squeeze the “story” in proving particularly amusing, and this is probably the highlight of the volume overall. The next few chapters focus on Seki trying to market acorns, prepare buried treasure, and act out Christmas roles, which are all decent but nothing too spectacular.
The next two are fortunately quite amusing, though, as Maeda fights back when Seki uses him as a dart board, and our “hero” films an entire (surprisingly romantic) kaiju movie during class, both of which make for some nice changes of pace. Finally, Seki comes under attack by his own stickers, makes some useless yet impressive pencils, and forces Yokoi to juggle with a clever plot. Oh, and Thief X makes his reappearance in a somewhat amusing assault on classical art.
In Summary
The collection of stories this time around is yet another solid one, mixing some neat new tricks with some revivals of old favorites. Unfortunately there are a few weaker entries here that are just okay, including one that’s honestly a bit of a dud. Still, it’s great to see chapters here that manage to feel fresh despite how far we are in the series, such as the charming and creative kaiju story. And even some old topics like the robot family manage to get a nice new twist to make for another very amusing tale. It’s certainly not a perfect entry, but there’s still plenty to love here, and it’s definitely still worth a read for fans of the series.
Content Grade: B+
Art Grade: B
Package Rating: B+
Text/Translation Rating: B+
Released by: Vertical
Release Date: March 15th, 2016
MSRP: $10.95
