I'm starting to get the sense that there's a trend happening in manga, or at least in what gets licensed. The number of romantic comedies starring a short, soft-natured boy and a tall, often busty girlfriend who is tougher or cooler than him gracing my review pile seems to have grown rapidly, even just in the couple of years since I started this gig. Done well, I do very much enjoy the soft boy/wild girl dynamic, but so few of them seem to hit the mark I feel like I'm gambling my time every time I pick one up. I lost that gamble this time with Hitomi-chan is Shy With Strangers, a perfectly mediocre iteration of the genre.

The most visible influence on Hitomi-chan, outside of current trends, is Azumanga Daioh. Chorisuke Natsumi's art bears a noticeable resemblance to Kiyohiko Azuma's own, particularly in how he draws faces and especially with Yuu. Hitomi is something like a more extreme version of Sakaki, who appears tough due to her height and taciturn nature, but is really just shy and loves cute things. Although this is definitely an established character type by now, and not strictly confined to Azumanga Daioh, certain jokes, like Hitomi's failed attempts at befriending neighborhood cats, seem lifted straight from the older series. The gags are even paced like a four-panel comic, even though the format is that of a typical manga – looser and more freeform.

However, it undeniably lacks most of its primary influence's charm. The character designs are considerably less appealing – Yuu appears to have been taking bangs-cutting advice from Mark Zuckerberg – and the cast lacks chemistry. The characters are largely uninteresting and lacking in personality beyond their loosely-sketched roles in each gag. Hitomi is awkward and people think she's scary when she's actually sweet. Yuu is nice and wants to help Hitomi. Kaoru, Yuu's younger sister and Hitomi's classmate, is creepily obsessed with Hitomi's abs.

Actually, the art is at its best when illustrating Hitomi's abs. Kaoru describes them as, “lean muscles, but with a pleasant softness still intact,” and that actually comes through in the art instead of just being stated but never sufficiently shown. It's actually the most detailed and realistic the manga gets, and is something of a mismatch with the simplified, cartoonish faces and expressions. There are ways to make this work, but they require a defter hand than is applied here; instead, this just feels like the abs are there mainly as fetish fuel.

The volume has approximately three jokes: people think Hitomi is scary when she's nervous or shy, Hitomi has huge melons, and Kaoru is really into Hitomi's abs. Oh, and there's one joke where someone drops a popsicle on Hitomi's chest and it looks like someone jizzed on her tits. So classy and hilarious! For so few jokes to carry a manga, they need to be original or clever, which Hitomi-chan is Shy With Strangers is decidedly not. There's a lot of fanservice and the bodies are fairly well-drawn and realistically proportioned, but the constant attention on Hitomi's truly enormous knockers made me think about how gravity-defying they are, and how insane the cut on her uniform must be for it to fit like that. I understand that manga has a long and proud history of physics-defying bazooms but everything else around them being grounded in reality just made them stick out even more than they would. While I'm sure some people are into that and this will be an incentive for them to check out the manga, I decidedly am not and it's a knock(er) against the series as far as I'm concerned.

Nor is Hitomi, or anyone around her, interesting or likable enough to carry the rest of the humor for anyone who isn't specifically into this dynamic. Her sharp, uncomfortably toothy grins and constant unintentional glower may be funny the first couple times, but after the fifth or sixth iteration of the gag, I would have preferred having a greater sense of who she was as a person rather than see her solitary personality trait repeated ad nauseum. Yuu is such a potato that it's hard to think of a single adjective to describe him. He's… nice? I guess? By the end of the volume there are hints at some relationship development, but circumstances surrounding it kind of makes it hard to feel invested.

Hitomi-chan is Shy With Strangers is such a thorough retread, I can only really see two particular subsets of manga fans getting into it: those who have never come across this subgenre before and thus don't know how unoriginal it is; and those who love this subgenre and consume everything in it they find. And if you're one of those people, that's fine, I do not judge you for picking the series up. If neither of those describe you, however, this one is better off skipped.