The Manga Dorm

Most Netflix stuff stresses me out right now. I just needed something where I could laugh without thinking about what I was watching, and Comic Girls showed up at the right time.

The premise is as simple as it gets—a group of girls live in a dorm together and draw manga. That’s the whole plot. Doesn’t sound like much, but it works. Kaoruko Moeta is fifteen, draws four-panel comic strips, tanks in a popularity poll, so she moves into a manga artist dorm. She meets Koyume, Ruki, and Tsubasa, all working on different kinds of manga. They live together, complain about deadlines, push each other forward. That’s it.

And I’ve always been able to watch cute-drawn anime girls do pretty much anything, and this show gets that. The girls are charming enough that their struggles feel like they matter, even if the setup is ridiculous. There’s something comforting about watching other people work through the exact problems you know exist in creative work—the doubt, the comparison, feeling like your stuff isn’t landing.

The anime’s based on a manga by Kaori Hanzawa, drawn in the same four-panel style the character draws. Studio Nexus animated it, Yoshinobu Tokumoto directed. It doesn’t try too hard. The pacing is right.

It’s fine. When you find a show about girls drawing comics in a dorm, and it’s exactly what you needed, you don’t really need to say anything else.