I also had some concerns about the back cover...specifically the text. That's because the first of the four sentences lays out the premise of the series, but a little too thoroughly, as it contains information that is presented within as a dramatic, climactic reveal. In other words, the back cover copy contains a major spoiler of the story within.
(On the other hand, this volume came out in 2020, and the series wrapped up seven volumes later, so I suppose there's a good chance that pretty much everyone interested in it have already ready it. Why am I coming to it six years late? Well, I only just heard of it. I was ordering a volume of Skip and Loafer through my library's online catalog, and it has this feature that, when you place a hold, it suggests three other supposedly similar items to check out "while you're waiting." As I'm so enamored of Skip and Loafer, I thought I'd give this a chance.)
The book, at least for most of this volume, looks like a rather classic love triangle involving three classmates in their third and final year of high school.
Our protagonist is Taichi Ichinose, a short kid with messy, black, very manga-looking hair. When he was in grade school, he was friends with Toma Mita...or, as one of his current friends call him, "The Toma Mita." Here's how that same friend describes Mita, for the benefit of readers:
Starter on the baseball team. Athletically gifted. Surprisingly intelligent.
Talented and above average at anything he does.
Add to that the fact that he's 6'2", conventionally attractive...
...well-built, friendly, popular and funny—it's no surprise all the girls in school are obsessed with him.
He's effectively school royalty. The king of our class.
No one here has a better life than him.
Taichi and his three best friends, Mon-chan, Yokki and Omega, are...not that. In fact, Yokki, the friend who gave the above little monologue about Mita, says that "he's like a different species than us," and while that seems pretty melodramatic, the way Kaito draws Taichi's three friends, they do seem to be a different species than Mita...and the rest of the school. They seem to belong to an entirely different manga and, visually at least, Taichi seems to have more in common with Mita than them.
The third point of the love triangle is Futaba Kuze, a short, cute, painfully shy and clumsy girl. One of Ichinose's friends compares her to a hamster, and Ichinose himself narrates that he tries not to look at her, suggesting that she reminds him too much of himself.
A chance encounter in a bookstore between Ichinose and Kuze gradually leads to the latter sharing a secret with the former: She has a crush on Mita and wants to pursue him. Since Ichinose was his childhood friend, perhaps he could help her...?
Quite reluctantly at first—Ichinose feels uncomfortable around both Mita and Kuze—he finds himself helping Kuze, and then coaching her and then, ultimately, hatching an elaborate plan to set them up on a kinda sorta date, in which he asks Mita to go to the movies with him, and then they will "accidentally" run into Kuze, and then he will make an excuse to leave the two of them alone.
Now, if you've watched TV or movies before, or read any romance books or manga, you can probably see where this is going, with Ichinose starting to develop feelings for Kuze, and Kuze soon regarding him as much more than just a guy trying to help her win her unattainable crush.
But there's a twist. Actually, two or three.
First, the date plan is spoiled when Kuze brings her heretofore never mentioned best friend, Masumi Itachi with her, as she was too scared to go alone. Interestingly, Itachi meets the exact description of Mita's dream girl that Ichinose had related to Kuze, and is very much not on board with the fake date plan...and gets extremely pissed off about Ichinose trying to set Kuze up with Mita, as she knows the two are incompatible.
After plenty of comedy and drama, we get to the big reveal at the end, which I will now spoil, just like the back cover copy did. After what turned into a group date, in which the four all went to the movies together as friends, Itachi confronts Mita, telling her that she knows that Mita is really in love with Ichinose, which freaks him out, and he demands to know if she told him.
"I haven't told him, no," she replies. "But I figured as much. You and I... ...are the same."
She, apparently, is also secretly in love with her same-sex best friend, Kuze.
So, what began as a love triangle of sorts is complicated further, becoming a love...square, I guess. Kuzu likes Mita, Mita like Ichinose, Ichinose is starting to develop feelings for Kuzu...who Itachi also likes. And not everybody knows who everyone else likes. Just us, the readers, really.
As a realistic—"slice-of-life", I guess they call these—teenage romance/comedy, Blue Flag is a lot of fun, and Kaito's last-scene reveal is such a curveball that it scrambles what began as a perfectly predictable story, so that I can't imagine what might come next, and am eager to see. Especially since, unlike, say, Skip and Loafer, I can't imagine a happy ending for all of the players, and yet, because they are all so likable, I want them all to get a happily ever after.
My one real quibble with the first volume was the rather awkward way in which Itachi enters the story. Looking back at the first scenes, I see that she does appear in one panel and gets a single line of dialogue—asking Kuze if she's okay when she drops her lunch—but she could have been rather easily better introduced then.
Because Kuzue decides to confide in Ichinose, it's sort of implied that she doesn't have any other friends and, oddly, when Ichinose tells Kuzue that Mita had previously described his ideal girl as tall and slim with long black hair and a big chest, she didn't remark that her apparent best friend looks exactly like that.
Anyway, I liked this one a lot and am glad I found it when I did. It will indeed give me another high school slice-of-life romantic comedy manga to read while I wait for the next volume of Skip and Loafer (which actually comes out next month).
Oh, and like Skip and Loafer, I have no idea why it is entitled as it is...
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