Review by Frank Plowright
John attends a prestigious school where the super-powered elite are educated and studies alongside them despite a lack of any apparent super powers. He keeps his head down and keeps to himself, except occasionally stepping in when he sees bullying. Fortunately for John, all those super powers mean an infirmary that can heal broken bones in three hours. His one friend is Sera, seen on the cover, and pretty well overloaded with power.
Under the alias uru-chan, Chelsey Han works in a digitised manga style, not averse to frequent use of the annoying manga trait of not drawing people’s eyes, sometimes several times on the same page. She nevertheless draws a decent portrait, if using repeated images, but facially pretty well everyone has the same features, so they’re distinguished by hair style and colour, a technique that works as long as groups are small. Flashbacks feature strongly, particularly involving Sera, whose attitudes towards the majority of fellow pupils are gradually explained.
A recurring theme from the beginning is that power makes right, a matter that greatly annoys John. It’s not just in physical conflicts, but also in more ordinary situations such as an early incident at the mall. It’s reinforced in the bragging rights being allocated by Turf Wars, in which a school’s elite face off against another school in a test of powers. John, though, has secrets of his own. He’s aware when he’s being followed, and his father wrote a book on superpowers considered so dangerous and influential in upsetting the status quo that it was eventually banned.
With the art functional rather than outstanding, it’s the soap opera drama that carries unOrdinary. A few points fail the logic test, such as it being possible to ban a book in the digital era, but the facility for drama is uru-chan’s greatest skill. Plots build on small moments in an atmosphere of suspicion and deceit. Against a backdrop of superheroes in the world outside the school being killed by a gang, uru-chan explores the fundamental principle on which the school operates, reflecting society. Wellston High has some pretty powerful pupils, but the teachers are even more intimidating, and uru-chan ensures her characters transmit as real by providing them with credible motivations. John is the exception, getting under everyone’s skin, but despite leading the plot much of the time he’s supposed to be a mystery.
That mystery increasingly becomes the focus toward the end when circumstances change and John becomes an even greater target. What readers might have suspected for some while is confirmed before the end, proving the ideal moment to close off before leading into unOrdinary 2.
