Wish It Was Invisible

 

If you’re like me, then you use a Samsung Android phone.  And that means that your Google page when you first go on the internet immediately bombards you with ads or with the news of the day.  For a short while, back in the early months of 2022, the top article on my home page was always an invitation from Shonen Jump to look at a free preview of their apparent “new hit” Kubo Won’t Let Me Be Invisible.

 

I did read this first preview chapter, and found it to be nothing worth writing home about.  But then I saw the first physical copies of Volume One available at my local Barnes and Noble, so I figured I would take a look.

 

Sadly, my opinion did not change.

 

Long story short, Junta Shiraishi is basically invisible to everyone at his school.  Other students sit on him and he must work hard to make sure that the teacher (who oddly resembles Ochanomizu from Astro Boy) does not mark him absent by mistake.  The only one who ever seems to notice him is classmate Nagisa Kubo (for plot reasons).

 

The series itself has very average artwork and mild amounts of comedy, but is also deadly boring.  Funnily enough, the first volume includes a translated version of the original pilot chapter that was submitted to Shonen Jump in the first place, and it somehow feels worlds better than the actual finished product that we wound up getting.

 

One small thing that seperates Kubo Won’t Let Me Be Invisible from something like Teasing Master Takagi-san or Komi Can’t Communicate or something like that is that not only does Shiraishi have a baby brother named Seita, but Kubo also has an older sister named Akina.

 

And that’s it.

 

Finally, I should say that even the title of the work seems a bit misleading.  As I see it, the title seems to be saying (or at least implying) that Shiraishi actively wants to remain invisible, but the troublesome Kubo just will not leave him in peace.  She will not allow him to just sit there stewing and wasting his life away.  (This is clearly not the case; Nagisa is a funny-ish character who’s trying to break Shiraishi out of his shell, but there’s nowhere near as much drama as my first interpretation of the title would have led me to believe.)

 

My advice to you, dear readers, is to pretend that this series is invisible.