Review - Assassination Classroom Volume 1

As of right now I have about 30 unread volumes of various manga series on my shelf, so I'm putting Nabari on hold until I get the last two volumes next week, and then I'll review each volume in one fell swoop. So today, I bring you a review of the bizarre Assassination Classroom (sometimes abbreviated as AssClass). ONWARD!

STORY

The students of class 3-E are in a peculiar situation. An alien octopus (who isn't technically an octopus nor an alien, since he claims to have been born on Earth) who is threatening to destroy the Earth by the time the students graduate is now teaching their class. The mission of the students is to assassinate their teacher!

Sensei's all smiles, all the time

And that's it. As strange as it sounds, that's the entire premise for this manga, which has sustained itself past 100 chapters with no end in sight. But its off the wall wackyness is probably the main draw. In this era of sequels and reboots, a strange new premise is hard to come by, and when it works, it's a real winner.

ART & PRESENTATION

The art in this series, while not sheer brilliance, is very nice. It's cleanly drawn with great backgrounds, good character designs, and smooth and concise action scenes. My only beef with it would be that a lot of the characters have very similar faces. Other than that, it's pretty good. There's really only one standout art bit. It's pictured below.

Imagine if your school teacher made this face

Viz Media does a good job with the presentation. The translation is clean, and the cover is great. The only weird thing is that there is a completely blank page, front and back, right at the beginning of the book. It's weird.

CHARACTERS

The characters in this volume are Sensei and an entire classroom. And there's a lot of kids in the class. That said, there are three standouts.

The first is Koro-Sensei. Even though he's out to destroy the Earth, he's a great teacher. Even while his students are attempting to kill him, he's still giving instruction. He also has a wide array of faces. Based on his mood, his face is a certain color or combo of colors. It's a clever idea, but doesn't always work since the manga is black-and-white.

Koro-Sensei loves all sorts of foreign indulgences

Next up is Nagisa Shiota. He's a trap. Every time he pops up, I have to remind myself that this is, in fact, a boy that I'm seeing. Besides that, Nagisa's not very developed yet. He seems to be the 'main character' besides Koro-Sensei, but we don't know a whole lot about him yet.

*NOTE: NOT A GIRL

Lastly is Karma Akabane. He's the 'bad-boy' character for this series. He's also the best one so far at trying to assassinate Koro-Sensei. We get a bit of development on him in terms of learning about his personality, but not a whole lot.

Surprise, Octoteach!

FINAL VERDICT

Weird. That's the perfect word to describe Assassination Classroom, but it's that very weirdness that is the main draw of the series. Plus/minus!

+ Weird, strange, but totally original
+ Good art
+ Humorous and exciting simultaneously

- If you really don't like tentacles, you aren't going to like this
- Strictly episodic at this point

With that in mind, I give Assassination Classroom an overall rating of...

B+ - BUY IT

Assassination Classroom is a lot of fun. Get into this soon, if you haven't already.

(I don't own Assassination Classroom. All rights go to the author, Yusei Matsui, and the licensing company, Viz Media).