Koukou Debut - Addictive fluffy highschool romance

Koukou Debut Vol. 01 by Kawahara Kazune

Quoted from Wiki:

Haruna Nagashima gave her all to softball in middle school, now that she has made her high school debut, she has decided to give her all for a new goal: getting a boyfriend and falling in love. However, she has one small problem—since she never paid any attention to fashion or trends in middle school, she has no idea how to go about attracting her yet-to-be-found love. But a chance encounter with Yoh Komiyama provides her with the opportunity she needs. If he coaches her in how to become attractive, surely she can find herself a boyfriend.

Just from the short summary above you can almost feel the "fluff" of this manga series. It does seems that the storyline is a bit cliched and ordinary, with the girl character having no experience in love blah-blah-blah and managed to get a guy who is so super-handsome that you can only get them from mangas. But I guess it's that old-hat trick that made me ended up reading it, and loving every bits of it. Fluffy shoujo mangas, IHMO to put it bluntly, are just fanservice mangas specially for girls, just like how pantyshots and bouncing boobs are to boys. It can be addictive especially for girls that love happy endings and sweet romances.

In this series, although Haruna is a 'cliche' for being a girl wanting to experience love, she is definitely different from the other girl characters you often see. She's someone you would love to be friends with; friendly, helpful and strong (as in physical strength lol) contrasted with her naive and straight-forward personality. Same goes to Yoh, where you might be encountering a very different personality style if compared to other handsome cute guys in shoujo titles. It's hard to exactly describe Yoh's personality, he's mild and quite a caring guy with his friends, yet he's easily embarrassed but has this cool aloof aura that makes girls stay away from him (somehow this doesn't work on Haruna). Both of them are fell in love clumsily, yet it's in a kinda sweet way. The characters' personalities are quite unique and likable, they don't look too 'fake' and unreal (you get that alot in cliche shoujo titles with naive girls and arrogant handsome boys). The storylines are mostly predictable, but it isn't bored or annoying. The art is quite simple and plain, but overall it's neat and compatible with how the story goes. The arts get better and better later on. And of course this whole series is funny as hell. Most of the scenes are sweet and fluffy, but it isn't that type of sugar that overloads and kills your senses with them.

This series has just ended with 12 volumes in Japan recently, and you can get the first few volumes in English, published by Viz Media just a few months ago. I've managed to find only 2 volumes in Chinese, hoping to find more volumes later when I have the time to go out. You can also have some online reads in OneManga.com or get the scanlations up to vol11 directly from NCIS. There is also a Koukou Debut LJ community where you can find loads of avatars, infos, scans and even fanfics posted. There's also a Drama CD available, and you may be able to find the download link from the community if you put some effort in searching it.

And some extra small interesting trivial: Midorikawa Hikaru, seiyuu (voice actor) for Yoh Komiyama is actually the same person who voiced Tatsumi Souichi in Koisuru Boukun Drama CD. *ehem check back this post if you are curious*

Koukou Debut is actually one of hundreds shoujo titles I've read that is good enough to get me hooked with just the first chapter. Definitely a recommendation for those who would love to have a debut read on shoujo mangas!