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If you’re like me and found this manga from a certain popular YouTube video, hoping to find a “normal yuri comedy”, I’m just here to reconfirm what you already knew: This is a normal yuri comedy— and a good one at that.
Personally, I find this work to be best for casual reading– something mindless to flip through while waiting for a meeting to start or at the tail-end of a break when there’s nothing else to do. The episodic, lighthearted nature of the chapters means that it’s pretty easy to pick up whenever and wherever without much effort. Ningiyau’s clean and expressive visuals (I ... cannot overstate her mastery of the silly face) and punchy character writing add to the ease– in both respects, School Zone Girls wears its heart on its sleeve, so there’s never overly busy visuals or purple prose-y dialogue to digest if you’re looking for something relatively straightforward.
The shortness of each chapter (averaging 4-6 pages) and the constantly rotating cast means that if a premise or character dynamic doesn’t land for you, it’s not long before the manga switches gears again. Plus, no one joke or idea has enough time to overstay its welcome, keeping the manga from getting stale. While this constant jumping around can make the story seem kind of aimless or even vapid during longer binge reads, it’s a bit more digestible if the time between reads is spaced out and you’re not going through too many chapters at a time.
To just call this manga “just an episodic comedy” would be selling it short, however. Though it does take around 2-2.5 volumes to get there, around the tail-end of volume 2 / beginning of Volume 3, School Zone Girls really grows into its own, making more explicit the undercurrent of a serial character drama amidst the comedy. That is not to say that it loses its charm– the goofy expressions, questionable antics, and Class S style intimacy of the characters never goes away, but the explorations of the girls’ oftentimes maladaptive relationships to each other becomes surprisingly grounded. The manga is still being produced, so it's impossible to remark on any endings or draw conclusions about where things might be headed, but I’m very excited to see where this story ultimately ends up. Despite the maturation of the story over time, the comedic vision is uncompromised, and the manga remains as fun and bombastic and ridiculous as the first chapter. If you have a few minutes to spare, definitely check this one out.