Probably the series we watched the most of is Comic Party (ComiPa for short). This series, which Mayama had casually read the first 2 volumes of manga for and was mildly amused by, is hilarious. The premise is this: There's a perfectly normal high school senior (Kazuki) and his even more normal female friend (Mizuki) (not girlfriend though you get the sense she wants to be in many ways....they act like Mayama and I really) who are basically commandeered by their other friend (Taishi) who's pretty much a hugely obsessive otaku (though I don't think they know that somehow) and he takes them to a doujinshi convention. From there, you see that Taishi has a huge plot for using Kazuki and his drawing skills to sell their own doujinshi under the corporate name of Brother 2. Taihi is pretty much hilarious and his entire characterization is that he's either busy scheming things for Kazuki or having random overdramatic outbursts about something. He makes me laugh. Mizuki, meanwhile, gets really mad that Kazuki is turning into an otaku and drawing comics instead of his usual work. Kazuki really has no idea what's going on. Along the way they hook up with numerous other characters in the doujinshi world....all of whom are hilarious in some way. The anime does whatever it can to spoof other shows, and the liner notes inside the case are extremely helpful in explaining this. I think that if you've seen the shows being spoofed it's pretty easy to get, but I hadn't seen the one they particularly like to spoof so I didn't get a lot of it. I think it's a lot like the random references to things that Family Guy likes to do, so if we were more familiar with obscure anime we could play the game where you try to yell out what show they're spoofing. Again, I only watched the first DVD, and we only technically own 3 out of 4 discs (damn you people at Half Price Books selling 2 copies of the series but only DVDs 1-3), so I don't know if this rapidly goes downhill or not, but thus far it's a random and hilarious good time about the underground manga industry and all the crazies that come with it.

NOTE!!! Mayama either did or probably will/should do a real review of this series.  I'll check with him and get back to you. 

posted by Yukino @4:11 PM comments