The interesting thing about the world of Assassination Classroom is that there are slivers of it reminiscent of other school or teen comedies, and the manga’s unique angle on that genre—teenagers recruited to assassinate their teacher, Koro Sensei, who just happens to be the octopoid being that destroyed the moon and threatens to do the same to the Earth—sounds like something that Archie Andrews or Jughead Jones would daydream while they were in Miss Grundy’s class.
But this is not Riverdale. As Assassination Classroom Vol. 9 opens, Class E is on a roof, facing off against the assassins that have just poisoned them. Nagisa must defeat an old acquaintance, Takaoka, to obtain the antidote. When Class E returns to school, Koro Sensei becomes preoccupied with matchmaking, and bringing Phys Ed Teacher Tadaomi Karasuma and English Teacher-slash-assassin Irina Jelavich into a relationship. As Irina is attempting to kindle Tadaomi’s feelings for her, the assassin “Death” has words with her father, Lovro. Finally, Takebayashi has a chance to leave Class E, and when it turns into a “no-win” scenario, he makes a “Takebayaashi Maru” moment out of it.
Assassination Classroom is consistently funny and entertaining, and while it aims at a teenage audience with its shonen manga formula of enormous boobs and action at the slightest pretext, it also makes fun of these tropes with such outlandish exaggeration that, as an adult reader, you have to smile. For instance, the orally fixated assassin that, instead of talking around a cigarette, talks around a revolver that he holsters in his mouth. There are occasional laugh-out-loud moments, like this page, which recalls a certain famous cherry stem scene in American television and makes we wonder if Twin Peaks was also a big deal in Japan:
Yusei Matasui is not only a very witty writer, he is also a deft artist with a good eye for page, panel and figure. His panels swell, fatten, shrink, or widen to accommodate his narrative lens, and he uses the unique features of comic book storytelling to do things that you can’t do in an anime, such as focus on one item of importance in a ribbon wide panel at the center of the page while two or three other preceding and subsequent moments are presented on the same tableau, as if they happened all at once in an artistic arrangement.
While it’s not my favorite Viz manga (that would be either Food Wars or Master Keaton), I definitely enjoy and highly recommend Assassination Classroom, and it would fall on my top ten list of VIZ manga.
You can find NerdSpan’s review of Assassination Classroom Volume 4 by following this link.
(Editor’s Note: Viz Media provided NerdSpan with a complimentary copy of this manga for review.)
