School Rumble, Volume 1 Book

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[I read the first chapter for free on Kodansha's website]

Holy shit. The first chapter ended my life. I was laughing so hard I was crying and I couldn't even try to keep reading because looking at the page just kept knocking me out. This first gag is so funny oh my god. I love how deadpan-ish it's delivered: It tells you- or you see what's happening and there's no reaction which just makes it funnier for some reason. (Straight Man? I don't know her.) SO good, holy shit. After I finished reading the chapter, remembering the gag would make me laugh out loud again and again. This happened at least four times over the ret of the day. I think I'm going to need to start collecting these volumes.

I watched the anime of this with my brother waaaaaaay back in the day, when I was like sub-10-years-old or something, and we both loved it. (The anime has a great English Dub btw, would recommend.) So I had to try out this first chapter.

*Edit*: I now own physical copies of the first 11 volumes!!!! Plus a few in Japanese, since this series stopped serializing (physically, in English) at volume 16 (which was put in a bind-up along with volumes 14 and 15). These were a journey to get my hands on, I tell you.

First of all, I found out that these bad boys are NOT IN PRINT (in English) anymore!! You literally cannot buy new physical copies of this series! How sad. You can buy English e-books of the whole series, but that's just not the same.

Second of all, because of this, half of the English volumes are set to ridiculous prices, like from $20-$60+, when these originally sold for 13 bucks a pop. Luckily I was able to get the books of the first half of this series for reasonable prices, however shit gets crazy after volume 11. I'm basically forced to e-book it after that, le sigh. Until then... I've got 11 volumes to read!! (hide spoiler)]