Tejina-senpai
Magical Sempai

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You'll know whether you like Tejina-Senpai by the time you finish the first chapter. It is a very straightforward gag manga with a fair bit of ecchi. How much you like Senpai will determine how much you like the manga. Most of the comedy comes from how she loves and constantly tries to do magic tricks but gets too nervous to them properly in front of people. I adore Senpai, so I love the manga. I also think the art is really good for this type of manga, effortlessly switching between comedic and attractive. If you have a low tolerance for ecchi, you might give ... this manga a pass. There is usually a panty shot or something else ecchi once a chapter. Overall, though, if you are looking for something light and funny and cute, Tejina-senpai is wonderful.

tl;dr: A solid though repetitive comedy manga about screwing up magic tricks.

This manga is a comedy manga about a high school magic club. It’s not a 4-koma, but it feels a lot like one due to each chapter being divided into very distinct 1-2 page segments, the vast majority of which are centered around a single gag. The primary focus in terms of comedy arises from the fact that the president of the magic club despite being decent at magic, has such a strong case of stage fright that in the presence of just a single other person she’s unable to perform even the simplest ... of tricks. As such, the majority of the tricks go terribly wrong. She’s very prideful however so she generally refuses to admit she screwed up, and she’s also kind of stupid so she’s terrible at salvaging things.

However, her assistant refuses to play along with her completely, so she’s often left to deal with the messes she makes on her own. As for the assistant, he doesn’t really care about magic much and is basically only staying in the club because she’s hot. That’s essentially the other focus comedy wise, as there’s a lot of innuendo and such. There are other characters as well that add some variety to the comedy, but even with them it doesn’t stray too far from these two aspects. It doesn’t really change much or evolve as the manga progresses either. As such, while I think the humor is pretty solid in and of itself, towards the latter half of the manga it definitely felt like it was getting stale and repetitive.

In addition to the comedy, the manga does explain various magic tricks and adjacent topics. She may be terrible at actually performing magic tricks, but she’s decent at explaining them. A character joins the club that’s also great at street performances, such as balloon art, juggling, or shadow puppets. And the nearby president of the chemistry club occasionally barges in and explains the science behind things. The thing is that it isn’t good at any of this. The explanations are pretty shallow, and the stuff that’s being explained is generally pretty simple too. That would be fine for the start, but it doesn’t really get any deeper as it goes either, and thus the explanations, and the tricks themselves really, start getting kind of boring too.

And ultimately, the comedy and tricks are all that manga has. There is essentially no focus on characters, with the main male and female characters not even getting names, simply being referred to as Sempai and Assistant. There’s no real character or relationship development. There are hints of both at times regarding both the male and female main characters, but ultimately nothing actually happens. The manga ends with things pretty much in the state the manga started out on, and while I suppose that isn’t too big of a deal for a manga like that that’s very moment to moment focused, I can’t help but being at least somewhat disappointed.

Also, I used the term Sempai since that’s what the official translation uses, but I’m not much of a fan of that. Yes, I know under traditional Hepburn the romanization should be with an m and thus it’s technically an okay way of doing it, but no one uses that for anime/manga at this point ‘senpai’ is so well established among English readers that I think it should be used unless there’s a particular reason not to, which I don’t believe there was in this case. Other than that, the translation struggles at times with translating certain jokes and goes a bit too far in removing references that English readers might not understand, but overall, I’d say it’s decent enough.

The art is a bit rough in the beginning, but over time I’d say it evolves to be pretty solid. Style wise it’s definitely a bit weird but I thought it fit well and enjoyed it. Character design wise I thought it did a pretty good job considering the setting, outside of Assistant who was just completely boring.