Now that Kou (aka Recruit/Rec) is an official member of the community, he faces two big challenges: finding a job to contribute to the bridgefolk and then protecting their land. With combining the original third and fourth volumes of the manga, expect a lot of other crazy antics in between involving love triangles, fire drills, and marathon races.
In other words, it’s just another normal day for the folks under the bridge.
Arakawa Under the Bridge Volume 2 continues the first volume’s pattern of quick-hitting chapters that weave together to create mini-arcs. If you liked or disliked the first, the second isn’t going to change your mind. For some readers, rather than Arakawa Under the Bridge being unfunny, the real issue is that it’s not the best anytime, anywhere comedy. Storylines can last for several chapters, and the real punchline can take a while to set up. Plus it’s easy to not realize you’ve started a new chapter into a couple of pages in. This may seem like a small complaint, but for a thick volume like this, I would have expected the manga to be a title that you can easily grab for a quick laugh in just a couple of pages.
Story-wise, it’s also hard to judge whether a lot has happened or if not much has happened. Kou decides to run a school to install some common sense in everyone else. This gets shelved by the second half of the story. In fact, if anything, Kou is being infected by Nino and the gang. He hilariously acts like an innocent, somewhat delusional maiden after getting his first kiss, and later he assumes the man who went into Hoshi’s trailer became his victim. (The guy, of course, was Hoshi without his masks.) But his straightman routine is still a large part of the story, especially since Sister can’t put his military training aside even during a friendly race, P-ko shows she’s a danger to the world, and Stella and Hoshi keep challenging their rivals with mixed results.
However, for me, the highlight was Kou’s father. He plays important roles in the story as both a direct threat (taking the Arakawa riverside property) and an indirect one (Kou’s estranged relationship). I still don’t like him as a person and abhor his parenting skills, but I’m liking him as a character. He and Kou are more alike than probably either of them want to admit, but dad’s haughtiness is even more hilarious. I think I laughed the hardest during his scenes, and that’s saying a lot considering the competition. There are fun times all around, although Nino tends to feel like a secondary character too often.
The art, meanwhile, isn’t that much different from the opening volume’s. The author includes a lot of visual humor, most notably Stella’s transformation into a Fist of the North Star-like character. I am impressed by the number of color inserts Vertical has included in Arakawa Under the Bridge. But again, I wish Nakamura had included “end” or something in each chapter to help add some separation. It’s a benefit Crunchyroll’s digital version has over Vertical’s physical release. And speaking of the digital version, while the same translator did both versions, they are not carbon copies of each other. The lettering is different, and lines have been slightly altered.
Personally, I think Vertical’s version looks better, so even if you’ve read the whole thing on Crunchyroll, Arakawa Under the Bridge is worth the purchase. It may not be the best manga if you like solid chapter breaks, but it’s still full of wonderfully eccentric characters.