Reviews

DVD of the Month - September 2006

Comic Party Revolution

Volume 1

SCREEN

Have you ever been to an anime convention? They’re always in cramped hotels full of weird people, and it’s always 98 degrees and the air conditioner just broke. (Oh my, I can hear the mail streaming in responding to that last sentence. Sorry.) Now imagine that you’re in Japan, attending a similar sort of gathering—except there’s almost half a million people attending. That, in a nutshell, is the biannual Comic Market in Tokyo, and Comic Party Revolution is a romantic comedy (emphasis on “comedy”) about the bold college students who draw manga to sell at Comic Market-style shows.

If you have the original Comic Party anime (out now from The Right Stuf International), the difference here is that all the characters are older, and the show consists of one-off episodes instead of featuring a long, united storyline. Kazuki Sendo is still drawing dojinshi, and while he may not be the most popular artist out there, he has managed to attract quite the disturbed group of friends. There’s Taishi, his partner and the nutter who dragged him into drawing comics; Eimi, the self-proclaimed “queen of dojin” who’s got an ego as big as the moon; Chisa, an impressionable young girl who has a proclivity for chasing after runaway carts…the list goes on and on, and they all get introduced in Episode 1, set within a typical Comic Party expo. Can the soft-spoken Aya sell any of her comics? Can manga maniac and part-time superhero Subaru save her from a pair of perverted otaku snapping pics of her “assets”?

The next four episodes on this DVD continue to up the wackiness factor, as if that’s possible. There’s the stereotypical “beach” episode, but with a twist—Eimi can’t go because of summer-school commitments, so she spies on everyone else instead. Then, Eimi and a rival dojinshi group are accidentally assigned the same table at the next ComiPa, and their method of settling this—assemble their friends and play a game of baseball for it—has predictably disastrous results. And then there’s Episode 5, titled “Fierce Battle! Cosplay Fight!” I’ll just let your imagination run wild with that one.

Revolution is not going to change the world with its animation quality. The charm here is all in the characters—the easygoing Kazuki, his delusional friend Taishi, the frenetic Eimi. A different character takes the lead in every episode, and from the baseball game to the cosplay showdown, they’re all giggle-inducing in their own way. You’ll arguably get more out of Revolution if you’re familiar with the Comic Party world, but really, this is not that complicated a show. If you like anime comedy, you will love this series, period—and that goes double if you’ve ever been to a wet, hot, stinky anime con in late August.

—Kevin Gifford