Excellent!  It's just like the anime.  Sakamoto is this ridiculous character that everyone either loves or hates.  He's great a literally everything.  So much so that even the people who hate him for it, eventually begin to fawn over him like the people who love him.

 

We literally know nothing about him other than the fact that he's awesome.  He's never caught unawares, people who try to prank him end up having it turned around on them, he knows the answers in class, he helps people.... It just...he's absolutely ridiculous, larger-than-life.  The whole thing is just hilarious. I'm glad I got the manga.  There are little editions that aren't in the anime.  Little comments and actions that basically expand on the anime.

 

I think this review sounds ridiculous, and it probably does, but in my defense, I'm at hour 21 of a 24-hour readathon and I think I'm bordering on delirious.  Plus the whole thing is just insanely funny.  I'm definitely looking forward to reading the next volume.

Sakamoto tutors Yoshinobu (the bullied kid from volume 1) while deftly avoiding and finally defusing Yoshinobu's amorous mother. Then Sakamoto outwits a teacher bent on believing he's trouble, even managing to add the teacher to his list of admirers due to a kind act he performs. Then there are a few shorter episodes: dealing with a slug in cooking class, drawing a classmate in a way that manages to be both flattering and insulting, and saving a classmate during a fire drill (?). The volume ends with a group of delinquents pursuing Sakamoto and always just missing him. As they try to find him, they hear about his past mysterious exploits. Then there's an incident involving a delinquent trying to pick a fight with Sakamoto and ending up in a bizarre push fight against him.

I don't know why I requested this. I shouldn't have. I disliked the first volume, which I felt had too much an "uncanny valley" feeling to it to truly be funny. I mean, this series is supposed to be a comedy right? I'm not misunderstanding?

I had similar issues while reading this volume. I'm sorry, but Sakamoto makes my skin crawl, and I can't bring myself to laugh at the situations he deals with. I wonder if a different artist would change things. Technically, Sakamoto and the things he does aren't that different from the occasional humorous bits in Black Butler, where Sebastian accomplishes seemingly impossible feats in order to properly serve his master. I love that stuff in Black Butler, but it doesn't work for me at all here.

The first part of this volume was particularly awful. Yoshinobu's mother struck me as a pitiful woman, and I disliked that the volume seemed to be asking readers to laugh at her and her efforts to corner Sakamoto. Not only that, she was attempting to molest a teenage boy - not something I'd consider good comedy material.

 

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Sakamoto, a new and popular student, coolly and calmly deals with jealous bullies, a wasp, a kid who keeps getting bullied for his lunch money, a scheming girl who wants to make him her boyfriend, and a guy who uses him and other students as his slaves. There's also an extra story called “Broad Shoulders” that I think is unrelated to this series, but it's hard to tell because the main character looked an awful lot like Sakamoto. At any rate, the kid in that story was being bullied for his shoulder pads for some bizarre reason.

I found out about this series via a review somewhere, and I was really excited about it. I figured it would be humorous and weird. Instead, the humor generally fell flat, and the whole thing was weird in an uncanny valley sort of way. The characters looked just “off” enough that I was too busy being creeped out to enjoy this much. I really wasn't a fan of the artwork, which was a little too stiff for my tastes.

Some of the stories were also disturbing enough to make me question whether I have this series' genre wrong. In the story with the kid whose lunch money was being stolen, for example, Sakamoto wouldn't help him until after he'd gotten a job. After the kid tried to stand up to his bullies himself, he told Sakamoto that the lesson he'd learned was this: “I don't need to protect myself or my money, only my pride.” I sort of understand what Sano was trying to get across here, but still...fighting against his bullies could have landed him in the hospital or even gotten him killed if Sakamoto hadn't swooped in to help. In the first story, several bullies tied Sakamoto up and planned to strip him down, take pictures, and send the pictures to everyone. And I still don't know what to think about the story with the guy who was making other students his slaves.

It also bugged me that Sakamoto didn't seem to be interested in helping people so much as studying them and testing his theories about human behavior. There were indications that Sakamoto wasn't human. He refused to say his given name, the only information he gave about his past was that he'd once attended a place called “Innocence Academy,” and he had inhuman physical abilities. He might be a robot, or an alien, or something else entirely. At this point, my best guess is that he's an alien, living on Earth specifically to study human behavior.

If I do continue reading this series, it'll primarily be for the mystery of Sakamoto's origins and identity. None of the other characters were at all interesting or very memorable, Sakamoto's solutions to various situations weren't really that big of a draw, and the artwork kind of creeped me out. I really don't know what Sano was going for here. I mean, the series also included a lot of what I'd normally call fanservice, with many panels of shirtless or barely clothed Sakamoto and other characters, but it wasn't so much sexy as it was discomfiting and vaguely disturbing.

That said, there were still a few nice moments. For instance, I liked the panel in which Sakamoto demonstrated that he could easily remain in a seated position even after his chair had been stolen out from under him.

 

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

2.5 maybe.

The chapter with the mother of his friend... wow, creepy as hell. More horror/thriller than comedy.

More like 2.5. Maybe

Read till chapter 12.

I still don't know what to make of this manga. It is funny, but like, creepily funny. It is like Sakamoto is some kind of demon, more specifically, like a mix between Sebastian and William from Kuroshitsuji. He is extremely good looking (looks very much like William) and does all these awesome things, not to show off, but because he is interested in them. Pretty much like Sebastian. Like in this chapter where he is the gofer of a bully, and not because Sakamoto feels threatened, but because he wants to improvise in all these things, like making excellent snacks, polish shoes, making clothes, etc. It is like he doesn't have any feelings; it is always from the academic/cientific point of view. I think it is the same as with his only friend.

The art is nice but it reforces my idea of making this shounen a horror manga instead of a comedy one. It is similar to GANTZ and Battle Royale. Specially when the character is crying, super macabre. I honestly wouldn't have been that surprised if one of the characters suddenly exploted in million pieces, with blood all over the place. It has that kind of art, the gore one.

So, to summarize: creepy, with a horror/gore like art. But I can't deny it made me laugh a couple of times.