These Broken Girls Draw Better Than Anyone
Sometimes you don’t need a plot. You need four girls in a dormitory, a hard deadline, and someone crying in a closet because her manga got rejected again. That’s Comic Girls in its entirety, and for about twelve episodes it was exactly the medicine I didn’t know I needed.
The premise: Kaoruko Moeta is fifteen, draws four-panel manga strips for a magazine, and just placed dead last in a reader survey. Her editor, deciding that real-life experience might save her work, ships her off to a boarding house specifically for young female mangaka. There she meets Koyume, who draws shojo romance and cries at everything; Ruki, who draws ecchi and looks intimidating until you realize she’s just deeply embarrassed about her own genre; and Tsubasa, who draws shonen action manga and has the confident energy of someone who’s never once read the room. They suffer together, eat together, pull all-nighters together, and keep submitting pages to editors who mostly say no.
The show adapts Kaori Hanzawa’s manga—itself drawn in the same yonkoma four-panel format as Kaoruko’s in-universe strips, which is a nice formal joke—with Studio Nexus handling the anime under Yoshinobu Tokumoto’s direction. It’s charming work: bright colors, expressive faces, the kind of background detail in the dormitory scenes that tells you someone on the production team actually thought about where these girls would pin their reference sheets.
I watch too much prestige television and not enough of this. The kind of show where the biggest dramatic stakes are whether Kaoruko can submit her pages by Friday, where the emotional climax of an episode is a girl realizing her friend helped her without being asked—I find it genuinely moving in a way that’s hard to explain without sounding like I’ve completely checked out of adult concerns. Maybe I have. Maybe that’s fine.
There’s also something specific about how the show handles Ruki, the ecchi mangaka, that’s better than it has any right to be. She draws the stuff—suggestive poses, panty shots, the whole commercial register—and the joke is never that she’s shameless. The joke is the opposite: she’s mortified, constantly, and yet this is her talent, this is where her ability lives, and the show has a real affection for her embarrassment that never tips into mockery. I appreciate that more than a more self-serious series would ever allow itself to.
Cute girls drawing manga and struggling and supporting each other. That’s the whole thing. I don’t need it to be more.