Tiger & Bunny have returned but this is definitely their weakest outing. It’s not too surprising though because when you think about it, Anthologies always put you in a tough spot. You either have a story that’s really good so you’re annoyed when it doesn’t get to continue or you get a bad story that you want to finish already. It means that win or lose you are always thinking about the next story and that’s not the right way to go. On the whole the Tiger & Bunny cast is hardly one of the strongest either so a series of comedic tales for them would have a tough time landing anyway.

The 4 volume series is basically just a bunch of little stories about the heroes during downtime. It’s like the events in between the usual action scenes that you would have during the main stories. So we see how they all interact and each of their personalities are dialed up to 11 for the comedic antics. In general the idea of seeing the everyday life of the characters is fun and I’d like to see a spinoff like that for a bunch of big Shonen Jump titles but the main Tiger & Bunny show already does that.

Between the big arcs you always have the smaller adventures where they just have fun the whole time. So this isn’t really novel in that sense. Then as far as the comedy goes, the writing isn’t amazing or anything like that. You’ll have some funny stories but most of them aren’t all that funny and it boils down to the characters not being funny enough on their own. The jokes with Origami, Fire Emblem, and Bison don’t really work right out of the gate and those are 3 fairly big characters.

Blue Rose’s stories mainly revolve around Tiger and there are only so many ways you can do that one. So they are good but after a while you will notice some repetition there. I like it when Tiger is oblivious as that really fits his character and doesn’t even come across as forced the way that some of the others are. Dragon Kid and the King of Heroes probably could have had some fun stories but surprisingly they are given the shaft most of the time. I like to see them though and focusing on these two would have been a good idea for the series.

The artwork also changes a whole lot depending on the story. As a whole I would put the art below average though. It doesn’t feel like this would be the best work for any of the artists as they’re going in to do a story but you don’t see a whole lot of detail outside of that. I suppose the chibi stories are distinctive but as a whole you won’t be impressed here either. At least you can always follow along with what’s happening but as a non action title it’s not like that’s super hard anyway.

It may seem like there’s not a whole lot positive to say about this one but that’s because aside from being a filler where you get to see some wacky adventures, there isn’t much of a purpose to the collection. In fact it would be hard for me to even go into long detail about the collection compared to most other titles because there isn’t a main story or anything. It’s a bunch of short stories but ones that are so short there isn’t much to dissect in them. So this is very much a collection that you read but by the end you’re just not impressed. I think they would have been better off doing one shot volumes for various characters as spinoffs to expand the universe. That could have been more fun.

Or if you want to do a fun slice of life adventure then go all the way. I’m talking about a serious heart to heart adventure series where you have the characters just talking about things and maybe having a small adventure along the way. Season 2 did that after all and while it wasn’t my favorite adventures, at least they gave it a real effort. So forget the small anthology format and just go about it with this. Tiger & Bunny have fun banter in the show and you could certainly replicate that here. Not as a gag or anything like that but as a serious emotional story. It could work really well I’d think and is at least worth a shot over this.

If you’re going to do a comedic gag type anthology like this then the writing has to be exceptional. Unfortunately that just doesn’t happen here and it’s a lot easier said than done. It’s incredibly hard to be consistently funny, especially when you are trying to be. It’s why a lot of the funnier scenes in media tend to come from titles that aren’t even comedies because you can take your time and think of a great joke instead of stuffing 50 in and calling it a day as you hope that a few of them will land. I wouldn’t say any of the jokes in the manga really land all that well, at least not to the point of laughing while the TV show will actually have some good gags thrown in there.

Overall, I’d say you’re better off watching the show, movie, or reading the main manga over this one. The appeal would really be to Tiger & Bunny fans but with everyone basically out of character half the time or just exaggerated it misses out on actually giving you the fun day to day experience you were hoping for. It misses the boat and so you could read this one but there isn’t much reason too. I would just say to give it a skip altogether and there is no shortage of T&B titles to check out anyway so you’re good to go there.

Overall 4/10