It's not often that a Manga makes me literally laughing out loud.
Most comedy Manga were either totally unfunny and boring or just managed to make me blow the air slightly more forceful through my nostrils.
Grand Blue isn't one of those Manga.

The story isn't very special. The art is good but nothing outstanding. Except when one of the characters goes bonkers. Most of the time you'll probably laugh because of the ridiculous over the top depiction of certain emotions.
If you just want to lean back, have a good laugh and not worry about your (shitty) life, then this is the Manga for you.
If you look for anything deeper than just stupid, but very funny, comedy, then don't even bother.
We don't like you anyway.

EDIT: I initially rated this manga an 8 because i only read 6 chapters or so and thought that it would get stale over the time. Turns out, i still laugh my ass of and look forward to every new chapter. Shit's a solid 9, bois.

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Grand Blue is a masterclass work of slapstick and gag humor.

Although the series is about "diving", the setting and premise serve primarily as guidelines for the plot to direct its comedy. In other words, characters can derail into basically any subplot and then realign itself at the end of each arc to ensure the series doesn't go too far off on a tangent and overwhelm the reader with too much absurdity.

The setting itself provides a reasonable justification for the kind of humor you see. Drinking naturally comes with college parties and nudity "naturally" comes with drinking. Diving also offers a unique focal point to branch humor from with things such as diving signal gags, and of course, nudity.

In comedic manga, characters are essential to driving a joke home. Although every character is the complete opposite of normal, what they do makes sense because it’s part of their character and that allows the humor to flow. In Drifters, comedy can become awkward at times because malicious and serious characters would suddenly turn goofy for no reason and it messed with the image the characters were supposed to maintain. Every character in Grand Blue has a unique personality and together they can turn any normal scenario into a circus.

Most of what has been said can be said for many other series, but what makes this series stand above the rest? The Art. In Fullmetal Alchemist and Onepunch Man, gags are made by lowering the quality of art to portray the lighthearted or casual attitude of the characters in a high stake scenario, but in Grand Blue, the art quality goes up at the punchline to portray the high tension in the characters despite their situation being nothing serious. This drastic imbalance in what we see versus what we feel serves almost like another joke making it so that each punchline is two jokes rather than one . The flow of text is also superb as it feeds you puns and gags at a precise rate. In Gintama, the comedy is goes by the same formula as Grand Blue, but if you read the manga, the pages are covered in text and content within each chapter is way too condensed. Seeing the emotion and expressions of the characters is harder to visualize compared to Grand Blue, where each facial expression perfectly expresses the absurdity and emotional peak of the characters.

So that’s basically why I think Grand Blue is a comedy gold mine. Hopefully this review makes sense and if it doesn’t, there are plenty of other excellent review that give you an idea how amazing this series is.

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