Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken vol. 3

I didn’t start reading this volume from the beginning when I got it.  Instead, I flipped back to the “Notes on vol. 3” section for one specific reason:  To find out if “Eizouken” will continue to be published in English beyond this volume.  What I read told me that YES IT WILL!  Editor Carl Horn stated that Dark Horse is planning to license volumes four and five, and potentially volume six now that creator Sumito Oowara has returned to the series after a hiatus.  This is great news, so congrats to everyone for supporting this series.  We can’t stop yet, however, as vols. 4 & 5 aren’t in our hands yet and Horn didn’t say they were licensing all present and future volumes as well.  So continue to spread the good word about this series so that we’ll continue to be able to read about the club’s further adventures in English!

Which, this time around, involve the Eizouken crew trying to follow up the success of their sold-out film from the student festival.  Wanting to strike while the iron is hot, Kanamori suggests to Asasuka and Miszusaki that they make their next film with the intent of selling copies at a local convention.  The problem is that their school frowns on active money-making like this and the girls are once again struggling to decide on what their next film should be about.  Fortunately the student council is willing to help them out by getting them to evict a squatting member of the audio club.  A member who has all these sounds that the Eizouken crew can use for their next project.

Though this has been a generally episodic series, the first two volumes had loose arcs to them that culminated in their final chapters.  Vol. 3 is the loosest yet in that sense as there’s very little buildup between what the girls are planning for the convention and their actual attendance of it.  Even if there’s little connective tissue holding these stories together, they still manage to entertain on their own merits.  Most of which involve Kanamori as her financially conscious nature gets elaborated on to good extent here via conversations with the student council and the volume’s standout story where we get to see what she was like as a little kid (the answer being smaller, but no less driven).  While I’d have liked to have seen more commitment to an ongoing story with this volume, what’s here is still quite entertaining and enough to keep me scanning the Dark Horse solicitations each month in the hope that I’ll see vol. 4 solicited sooner rather than later.