For everyone who thinks they're weird, there's someone even stranger to help put things in perspective. That's how it works in fiction, anyway, and for the hero of Bisco Hatori's new series, it all turns out to be a question of where you're from. Ranmaru Kurisu is an oddity in his hometown, a rural fishing village where his lack of physical strength and tendency to get seasick mark him as the town loser – he can't fish, so he's clearly good for exactly nothing. Trying to escape that stigma, he decides to go to a university in Tokyo. While he never specifically says that he's going to “reinvent” himself, you do get the feeling that he's trying to become less of the local outcast by blending in with a larger crowd. That's not easy to do if you've spent your entire life being told that pretty much everything is your fault, so Ranmaru is trying to overcome two separate stigmas – what others thought of him and how he thinks of himself. Basically his self-esteem is nonexistent.

While this can make Ranmaru a difficult hero to enjoy reading about (at least at times), it does show us that Bisco Hatori is no one-trick pony – Ranmaru is markedly different from both the protagonists of her previous series, Ouran High School Host Club and Millennium Snow, and while Behind the Scenes!! does feature another wacky group of disparate individuals in an unusual school club, as Ouran did, that's really the only similarity. The Art Squad is a group that creates costumes, props, and special effects (including but not limited to make-up) for the three film-making clubs on their university's campus. While there are some of the same basic character looks and traits as in Hatori's previous work, it would be wrong to go into this thinking that we're getting another Ouran set in a different school – Behind the Scenes!! is entirely its own story with its own characters.

On the subject of those characters, Hatori has had a lot of fun naming them – when read in Japanese order (family name first), all of the main players have names that sound like film directors: Kurisu Ranmaru is Christopher Nolan, for example, while Kobora Soh is Sofia Coppola. Since Viz has transposed the order, this is a little harder to see when you first read a new character's name, although the one that is the easiest for English-speakers to recognize in terms of sounding it out in either direction is Enjoji Ruka for George Lucas. This is really the only translation issue in the book, which otherwise reads smoothly and has some notes in the back, although those only cover Japanese terms; some special effects/film words would have been a nice inclusion.

The story itself is a mix of Ranmaru's character development as he learns that maybe he's not Mr. Worthless after all and the antics and skills of the Art Squad as they create effects and props for campus movies. Ranmaru is basically pressganged into the club in the first place when he accidentally stumbles into a shot for a zombie movie, and club president Ryuji Goda both rescues and kidnaps him for the Squad. Although still convinced that he's useless (something bolstered by the disdain of his teenage relative Soh, whose family he lives with in Tokyo), Ranmaru slowly gets sucked into the Behind the Scenes!! world…and quietly revealing that he's actually a really talented crafter with hand-eye coordination most of us can only dream of. His evolution is handled slowly, with Hatori showing the readers that he's got skill while Ranmaru himself still doesn't quite realize it, and that works very well for this volume. It is, as I said before, a little difficult at times to follow a character with such low self-esteem, but the rest of the Squad never hesitates to acknowledge Ranmaru's worth, so we can see that eventually he'll reach a better place. As long as that doesn't take too many volumes, it should be fine; a lengthy series with Ranmaru remaining as self-effacing as he is in this book could get grating.

Behind the Scenes!! isn't quite as immediately engaging as it could be, but it has an entertaining cast of characters in the Art Squad with potential for interesting interactions and relationships between them. Hatori's art is much cleaner than it was in previous works, although pages still are very busy and tone-heavy, which can make it hard to read at times. As the story develops, this should be a lot of fun, and if you liked Gimmick!, this is definitely a series you'll want to check out. Ranmaru has definitely come a long way from his fishing village - which feels like it might be a Wizard of Oz reference, actually – and watching him learn that there are other ways to be useful besides physical strength and an ability to ride in a boat looks like it will be worth following.