3-nen Kimengumi

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The title of this manga translates literally to "Third Year Funny Face Gang" and it's the perfect explanation about the "plot". The extreme comedy Kimengumi was serialized in Weekly Shounen Jump from 1980 till 1982 (6 volumes, meaning 78 chapters + once extra chapter) and then it just changed its name and continued to be published for another 20 volumes in the same magazine because why not, let's enhance the comical.

The most important thing that the eventual reader has to understand is that this manga was made in order to make people laugh, the mangaka provided a high school setting, he populated it with some ... high schoolers (makes sense), some teachers and random citizens. Let's call it "slice of life" but only funny weird things end up happening because our Funny Face Gang aka the Kimengumi are the weirdest of them all.

The reader must be confused by now or have a vague image of something like danshi kokosei no nichijou or any other cute girls manga in high school eating cake and telling jokes, I say that they are badly mistaken. Our 5 main characters are ugly, they are so ugly you will laugh the moment their comical faces appear on the panels, they are so stupid they can't write correctly or they will even forget how to walk, what one does when he forgets how to walk, you may ask? just hand walk. That's the core mentality of our guys.

Like I said above, the comedy is made by the characters and as cliche as they are presented in the beginning, they destroy those cliches with their stupidity (now this is what I call good comedy writing). We have a "leader-type" character yet he's the most idiotic of the bunch, a guy who looks like a pro wrestler and drinks sake, is he even 18? a guy who eats all the time and he's lazy (this is kinda boring I guess), a feminine boy who's into dudes and a pervert that has 0 luck with ladies. Their goal in life and philosophy is to make people laugh and with that them laughing too because people laughed at their ugly mugs all of their lives and they got annoyed. They basically embraced their weirdness and chose to have a good laugh out of it.

There is this weird social commentary here, all Kimengumi taken one by one have individual traits, they are so different compared to the normal high schooler that would prefer to just sit around quietly and say nothing of importance, just follow the flow, Kimengumi are opposite, everything a good japanese will do, they will do it backwards.
Now we have other groups: a sports one, a delinquent one, a bishounen, a nerd one and others, all members of these groups will act the same, in the exact cliche manner that we would expect from them, even the mangaka tells us breaking the 4th wall that we "shouldn't bother learning the names of all members, just remember the leader and that's it, all are the same anyways".
Kimengumi clash with these groups and hilarity ensues, they do their own cliche thing while Kimegumi destroy that in a nonsensical and absurd way.

But this doesn't matter anyways, it was just a cool explanation, it's not like you have to think too much about it, the idiotic author will tell you lots of times, he will write that in between panels, I don't know why, maybe he was bored of drawing or maybe he went insane. The amount of times the mangaka draws himself talking to the reader about random stuff or just complaining about his characters is staggering.
And to be honest he's right to complain, all his boys do is act like imbeciles, say stupid things, transform into chibi, make references to something only the author understands. The only breath of fresh air is when this girl Yui appears (she is also a main character by the way) but she opens her mouth and we start laughing again not because she's stupid but she has to say something funny that works with the boys actions, it's that bizarre and chaotic every chapter.

It's a manga where anything can happen, there will be pages of people walking down the street and suddenly... they will strike poses. Why? I don't know but if you laugh you lose or you actually win because it's a comedy?
You may say: "mister pseudo-reviewer, I saw that the manga is structured, it has a sports festival arc and a school trip arc, you're an idiot!" You're right but it doesn't matter, the action is more chaotic than Brownian Movement, do you actually think the Kimengumi can sit still in a train?

The art style is shitty but it works, I'm sad it wasn't worse, the panels are small and 14 pages feels like an eternity spend in "idiot jail", you may say that fun things are fun and it should feel fast when you're having a good time. Not in this case, it's Kimengumi, everything is backwards.
You can look at Yui, at least she's cute, oh yeah, all characters have puns in the names, Kawa Yui means cute because she's cute, get it?

The author's name is Shinzawa Motoei, he wanted to write romcom but he discovered that he knows nothing about romance so he decided to make fun of everything he could've imagined, the result was this manga that was somehow loved. 26 volumes in total, one TV anime, one anime movie, let's get over the fact that he refused 3 offers to have this animated before, his reasons? he didn't want to see his idiotic characters on TV but scratch that, those 5 idiots are adorable in their own weird way.

Is the manga as bad, repetitive and all over the place as this review? yes but just like the characters, I have good intentions and honorable feelings, if you laugh reading this, I'm happy.