“Bangs and Forehead”
Creative Staff
Story/Art: Nene Yukimori
Translation: Amanda Haley
What They Say
You can’t be invisible when the heroine has her eyes on you!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
As the series rolls on, still without a huge chunk of chapters as Viz Media started this later in its run this property from Nene Yukimori continues to prove itself to be an entirely accessible work as I was able to pick up this in the early 80s range of chapters and enjoy it easily enough. The series is one that works through some familiar kinds of material here for a high school romance with a bit of comedy and that helps as you just have to get a handle on the way the characters interact with each other. Yet Yukimori’s a solid artist with good designs for the characters that feel their own so that it’s not just a carbon copy of something else and they make the locations work in their favor, though there are some slim panels as you’d expect.
After a few chapters involving a really good date sequence that went well for both of them, this installment shifts gears away from the relationship and just lets the girls be girls. Here, Saki has come over to visit with it being planned in advance but she was super hesitant about arriving. The reason why is that she cut her own bangs and can’t stand how she looks with them. It’s an intense reaction, especially when she reveals that they’re short by seven millimeters and that that’s almost a full centimeter to her. The panic is understandable, and as a father of girls myself I completely get it, but the overreaction is adorable on a character like Saki.
What the chapter does from there is to focus on fixing it, which Akina is able to do, and we see how she and Nagisa both get involved and it’s a good bit of Kubo family fun. They all support each other, which is good to see, and there’s a lightness and ease between them that really shines through. But at the same time it’s a very light and fluffy chapter that you can breeze through because there’s little else here. Shiraishi gets like one panel at the very end, which is fine as he doesn’t need to be in each one, but there’s not much else to the installment. But these kinds of buffers between “events” in a series like this helps things to smooth out and not feel like we’re going from one storyline to the next without a little life inbetween.
In Summary:
While I clearly enjoy the bigger moments and the more engaged aspects of the series, chapters like this are important to give us some good character fluff time because you can’t, and shouldn’t, focus entirely on just the big moments. You have to fill out their lives a little and offer the serious and silly moments to make it more. The focus on the sisters here over a bit of hair and ways to style it is completely empty of course but it delivers some really good fun and silliness. It definitely makes me like Saki just a bit more.
Content Grade: B
Art Grade: B
Text/Translation Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Shonen Jump
Release Date: December 8th, 2021
