Prison School vol. 11

Kiyoshi dies in this volume.  He gets better, though, and his experience puts him in a manic state that gives his shoulder-wars comrades the momentum they need to take the fight directly to Kate.  How did he come to die in the first place? That’s… best left for readers to experience themselves. All I’ll say is that it involves some of the best penis-related comedy I’ve read in recent memory.  As with most comedy in this series, it works because mangaka Akira Hiramoto takes a completely ridiculous setup and then treats it with as much serious drama as he can muster. That Kiyoshi’s situation is addressed with the same kind of seriousness you’d normally see applied to the actual death of a main character is what makes it as funny as it is.

It’s also good that this stuff springs right off the group’s complete and utter failure to restore Meiko’s personality.  I wrote last time that her resurrection by carbonation was dumb in a way that defied the title’s own logic and the actual reason we get for it here is thankfully more in line with what I’ve come to expect from this series.  Vol. 11 does offer something that by all rights should take its place in implausibility: Andre’s “gigantic” stature. While he’s always been the biggest character in the series, here he’s depicted as being large enough to carry the three members of the student council on his back and keep them out of headband-grasping range.  

Andre’s depiction here is something that’s completely unrealistic even by “Prison School’s” normally shaky grasp on reality.  Though I recognize this, it’s something that I think Hiramoto manages to make work regardless. Andre has always had the least believable character design of the series and we’ve actually seen the mangaka build up to this take on him over the past few volumes.  You also get the feeling that we’re not actually seeing size represented on the page here, but the impression he makes on the characters and I can’t believe that I’m actually applying this much thought to analyzing a character’s appearance in this series! Vol. 11 is still great dumb fun and that’s it!