Catching up on Now That We Draw

I enjoyed the first two volumes of Kyu Takahata and Yuwji Kaba's Now That We Draw (reviewed in this column and this one) enough that I wanted to keep reading it. The premise is quite fun. High school classmates Uehara Yuuki and Miyamoto Niina are both aspiring manga artists trying to break into the industry, and their shared dream seems to be the only thing they have in common. Uehara is quiet, friendless, socially anxious and at the absolute bottom of the social hierarchy, the kind of person one might expect of wanting to be a comics artist, I guess. Meanwhile, Miyamoto is bubbly, outgoing and gorgeous, the kind of girl all the boys at school have crushes on. Both of them are told by the editors they submit their work to that they have the same problem: Neither seems to know much about romance or relationships, despite trying to make comics on the subject, and it shows in their work. So, Miyamoto proposes a solution. They will pretend to date one another in order to gain experience.…