Prison School vol. 10
If you were hoping that the lesbian psychodrama which provided the high point of the previous volume would continue in some way here, then you’re going to be disappointed. The good news is that the sexy shenanigans of this volume are some of the best this series has offered up in recent memory. It starts off with a mortally depressed Kiyoshi engaging in some bra-spotting betting with Shingo and Joe and scaring them off with his ridiculously confident (and just plain ridiculous) predictions. Then Kiyoshi realizes that he and Hana switched underwear after their golden encounter and now she has to run a race with his boxer shorts. But she’s not used to them and the only way for Hana to get her groove back is for her and Kiyoshi to swap back — in the middle of the race! The craziness isn’t confined to the school campus, as the Chairman’s amnesiac adventures continue as he stumbles from facing a public indecency charge, to finding himself with a short-shorted woman with a familiar butt, and plunging right into a conspiracy-driven action movie all while still in his bikini briefs.
Yes, there’s still plenty of greatness to be found in this volume. What drags it down is the ongoing business with Meiko. The Vice-President of the Shadow Student Council’s personality has been regressed for a very long time now and the description on the back of this volume gave me hope that we’d finally see her old personality return. That… doesn’t quite happen here. There are some good bits to be had, involving the groping of the Shadow Council President’s chest *rimshot*, but very little progress is made towards restoring Meiko to her original self here. Worse still is that the small amount of progression that’s made doesn’t have much to do with anything resembling logic. Anyone who is still reading this series after ten (twenty, really) volumes should realize that the humor in “Prison School” only works as well as it does because there’s an absurd logic underpinning everyone’s actions here. To see it abandoned in this latest business with Meiko is a major disappointment.