You and Me
I don't mean to diss Hiroshi Aro (he's great), but to know him, it's helpful to know Rumiko Takahashi, since the influences (which Aro's open about) are so strong. You and Me is sort of like Maison Ikkoku crossed with Urusei Yatsura; high school student Aimu Yuu moves into a boarding house where he meets a cute girl, except that she's a ghost who haunts him, and the other tenants are a particularly hapless ronin (another Maison Ikkoku reference), a mainly shoujo (girls') manga artist, a landlord in Medieval armor, a career woman in wrestling garb, and various other weirdos. (I mean REALLY weird: stop-the-story, everyone-falls-over-because-the-gag-is-so-bad weird.) The basic plot involves the glasses-wearing, nerdy main character weighing his affections between various strange girls drawn in the plumpy cute '80s style. Fans of Aro's other Shonen Jump romantic comedy, Futaba-kun Change!, won't find nearly as much T&A in You and Me (perhaps Masakazu Katsura's manga had raised the bar by the time Futaba-kun Change! came around), but the plot is rewarding and even touching, and the jokes are dense and genuinely funny. There are many puns and in-jokes, which are annotated in the margins rather than being directly translated into English (for instance, "WOMGMAHHH!!" is annotated as "Garbled Nonsense").
Alistar Toth