この美術部には問題がある! 1

Premise

This manga follows the "weird and quirky" members of a high school art club, including:

• Usami, who is the "straight man" of the group and also thinks only fine art is real art
• Uchimaki, whose main goal in life is drawing the best 2D anime waifu
• the club president, who just sleeps all the time
• Collette, who was born overseas (?) and is very genki and causes shenanigans. Once she's introduced the book gets a lot better.

Each chapter is fairly episodic and there's not really an overarching plot other than whatever the chapter's main joke is.

Language Learning

The language in this book is not too difficult as it's mostly slice of life school related vocab, though there are some art related vocab terms as well. Personally I found chapter 1 to be the most difficult language-wise (because of the metaphorical jokes), the rest were much easier. There are some plot-relevant handwritten parts which need deciphering but if you have trouble with that, people in the WaniKani book club have transcribed them.

Overall Thoughts

Echoing the other reviewers, the book gets a lot better in the second half, but a lot of the jokes, especially in the first half, are around Uchimaki drawing waifus in fanservice-y poses and Usami disapproving. Besides not being a fan of those sort of tropes I found it pretty tiring. The second half does get better in comparison but the humor isn't like, say, Nichijou or Ruri Dragon -- it's just the main characters doing silly things based on their one line description + sometimes showing other sides of their personality. It might be more comparable to 可愛いだけじゃない式守さん but Shikimori had no fanservice (unless you count Shikimori Being Cool), had very good art, and the characters were likeable.

Overall an okay read, but not planning to continue with the series.

Starts a bit tropey, maybe going somewhere later

Initially, a lot of the humour focuses on the male leads obsession towards creating the perfect waifu and drawing her in rather fan servicey situations, while the female lead disapproves and gets angry about it. Eventually, some other characters get introduced, and we see more sides to the two leads, but that start can certainly put people off.

Language wise, there's nothing too difficult there I found. There's one chapter which probably comes with a bunch of new vocab related to occult and other phenomena that may cause some lookups required, but overall it felt reasonably beginner friendly.

Overall, I feel there's the potential down the line for this to become a better manga, but volume 1 at least didn't sell me on going further to check.

Showed some promise towards the end

A manga about a high school art club. There’s a bit of an overarching plot, with the inevitable budding romance, but in general it seemed more slice of life.

Funny at times. The first couple of chapters were a bit smutty, and didn’t hold interest as well. It improved quite a lot in the second half, and obviously went on to be successful as there are 15 volumes and an anime.