Crunchyroll Manga Sampler: Course Eight

It's been a good long while since our last course.  Indeed, just enough time for Crunchyroll to clean out a bunch of Kodansha titles and replace them with a few more.   That just means that our manga palates have been nice and cleansed, just in time for the latest round of titles:

COURSE EIGHT: LOVE THEORY, AS THE GODS WILL, & NANBAKA

LOVE THEORY

Shonen romances are a dime a dozen.  Create a story with a dorky lead, at least one cute girl, and a lot of complications and panty shots and you’re guaranteed to sell a bunch of tankobon and maybe get an anime.  So what could Love Theory do to distinguish itself from the crowd?  Add a ghost and a lot of questionable advice.

Like most pick-up-artists, Aiya’s advice has a few good, confidence-buildng ideas at their core, but most of them are based around faking sympathy and petty acts of courtesy to win over the ladies.  It’s fundamentally dishonest, but here it’s treated like a sure-fire solution to all of Yarahata’s troubles.  In fairness, even these false acts are an improvement on Yarahata’s natural personality.  He’s a schmuck of the highest order, a perpetually horny fount of insecurities who believes getting laid will be the answer to all his troubles but hasn’t the first clue as to how social niceties work.  He’s so over-the-top in his floundering that he shoots right past ‘sympathetic‘and lands square on the border between ‘buffoonish’ and ‘repellent.’  Not even introducing a boorish, bullying ex-classmate is enough to counter it.

The only thing more repellent is this story’s attitude towards women.  Nowhere is this more obvious than with Aiya himself.  When he’s not smacking around Yarahata, he’s literally lifting the skirts of random women to flash Yarahata as part of a running gag.  Nothing says hilarity like supernatural sexual assault!  Love Theory’s issues with women run deeper than panty flashes,though.  For as much as we see Saki, we get very little sense of who she is.  We know her job, we see the occasional glimpse of her at home with her family, but I couldn’t tell you the first thing about her other than she’s pretty and nice.  The women shown here are drawn in an odd, rubbery way with flat, babyish faces, all the better to pose them awkwardly to show off their T&A.  This stands in stark contrast to the guys, who look like knockoffs from Bakuman and tend to make outlandish gonk faces at every turn.  It’s a double standard that’s all too common in these sorts of stories, and it’s those double standards combined with this manga’s gross attitude towards women that turned me off fast.  RATING: 3/10

AS THE GODS WILL

It seems that the latest trend in horror manga is to theme it around children's games and other odd amusements.  I get the idea – it’s meant to take something innocent and familiar (at least to its original audience) and turn into something frightening.  The problem is that like any other horror manga, such a concept only works if the mangaka can strike the right tone.  Keep things too subtle and the effect is underwhelming; take things too far and it becomes comical.  Alas, Muneyuki Kaneshiro and Akira Fujimure ended up taking the latter approach and this is the end result.

Initially the manga starts off with what is basically the world’s deadliest game of Red Rover, thanks to a talking daruma.  You can tell that these early chapters were meant to be a stand-alone pitch, as most of the characters and plot threads within it end with the second chapter.  To its credit, those first two chapters do manage to pull off at least one really good twist.  It also tries its damnedest to milk as much drama as possible from Aoyuma and his bestie fighting over soccer.  Alas, after that point things start to get murky.  We get a strange side story with an abrasive hikkikomori before coming back to Aoyuma, and by that point he’s largely along for the ride (literally, for most of the volume).

As interesting as the evil (potentially alien?) automaton are, there’s not a lot of cohesiveness to the concept.  At times, it seems like the writer is just writing weird or cryptic things for the sake of being weird or cryptic.  This would be less noticeable if Aoyuma himself were an interesting character, but I don’t think Kaneshiro really has a set idea of who he is yet.  Is he a passive-aggressive slacker?  A panicky dweeb?  A schmuck who gets distracted at the merest glimpse of panties?  Aoyuma is supposed to be the audience’s anchor, but without a well-set personality of his own he leaves the audience feeling driftless.

At least Fujimura’s art helps to compensate for the story’s failings to a degree.  His style is confident and strong, even if a lot of the cast look like they came out of one of those "how to draw shonen manga" books.  He keeps the gore to a minimum, despite the fact that many people end up getting big holes blasted into their torsos or simply melted into goop.  That’s a good thing, as the shock value should be coming from the bizarre games and not from chunks of high schooler blasted across the walls.  That being said, it’s not enough to completely make up for the patchy path the story takes.  RATING: 4/10

NANBAKA

Don’t let the spacious panels, jailhouse setting, and garish color scheme fool you – Nanbaka is nothing but just another half-baked 4-koma comedy manga.  That means it’s subject to many of the same faults of mediocre 4-komas.  It’s just that we’re dealing with four wacky male prisoners instead of four wacky high school girls. 

That means we’re dealing with characters that defined more by their quirks than any sort of actual personality or motive.  Jyugo tries to escape all the time, Lino is girl-crazy, Rock likes to fight and eat, and Niko is a sickly yet hyper otaku.  This is all you will ever learn from them, and that is the punchline to every joke about them.  Supervising this gaggle of numbskulls is the prison guard Hajime, who works perfectly fine as a straightman but has even less to define him than his charges.   It’s hard to build good comedy out of a cast so undersketched, so it’s little wonder that the jokes so frequently fall flat.  It’s also no surprise that the mangaka tries to compensate for it in the way that all bad Japanese comedy does: by shouting every line.  It’s amazing how annoying it comes off despite the fact that it’s in print.

You’d think that the choice of a maximum security prison as a setting would add something to the humor.  After all, the contrast between the grimness of jail and the inanity of the prisoners’ jokes and predicaments seems in theory to be primed for comedy.  In practice it is anything but that.  It mostly leans on randomness and immaturity.  Honestly, you wouldn’t have to change many details to turn this into a high school setting or an office or anyplace where serious supervisors would have to mind rowdy charges.   That’s even considering the naked attempts at building up a serious plot in the last quarter of the volume, which obviously detracts from the comedy and doesn’t add anything all that interesting to the story other than more annoying prison staff and really blatant story threads.

It can’t even coast on its art style, despite the fact that this is published in full color.  That’s because the character designs are torn between bishonen bodies, ridiculous hairstyles and harsh, beady-eyed faces forever caught in wild gesticulations, while the colors seem to have been chosen for maximum clashing and turned up to Technicolor levels of saturation.  So on top of being painfully unfunny, it’s an ugly, bizarre looking series.  I’m kind of incredulous that Nanbaka ended up getting an anime series, much less that the manga ended up on Crunchyroll because it’s so obvious that the only thing the creator had in mind was a concept , a look, and the same crusty manzai jokes we’ve heard a million times before.  RATING: 2/10