aquagaze

Welcome to the Slack Parade

31 / woebegone wanderer /
kitchen nightmare /
melancholy's echo chamber /
geek of all trades /
alleged educator



Is it just me or has the well run well and truly dry on creativity in the world of manga? Just about every new work that pops up is a tepid variation on one of just about half a dozen premises, and none of them are even remotely interesting from a narrative standpoint.

I mean, how far have we come when Shounen fucking Jump is one of the final bastions of originality in this godforsaken industry?

More than ever, it feels like this wonderful medium is becoming little more than a vehicle for puerile power fantasies and derivative, dime-store erotica. There's only a handful of exceptions that have managed to keep my attention for some reason or another, and I'd like to share some newer ones that recently caught my eye here.

Hirayasumi

Hirayasumi by Keigo Shinzou

Slice-of-life is a genre manga and anime do better than any other medium, though it continues to struggle with one major issue — its insistence on perpetuating the myth that your high school years are the prime of your life. Hirayasumi, however, takes a much appreciated dive into the decidedly more complicated world of adulthood. Its characters hail from all walks of life, ranging from aspiring art students to the elderly — with as the only thing tying them all together our main character Hiroto, a washed-up teen heartthrob who now spends his days preaching the virtuous ways of the carefree slacker. The result is gentle and optimistic, often funny and charming, without ever feeling stilted or saccharine.

Boy's Abyss

Boy's Abyss by Ryo Minenami

I honestly can't tell whether this is an empathetic psychological deep dive into the listless teenage mind, or an overlong, miserable and misanthropic soap opera that occasionally reads like a Reddit thread written like a twelve-year-old. Can a manga be recommended as a nuanced analysis of generational trauma and cycles of abuse when it, intentionally or not, also ends up suggesting those cuh-razy women are the cause for all of a teenage boy's woes? Can a story in this day and age still depict its male protagonist having lots of dispassionate sex with people he really shouldn't be sleeping with for all the wrong reasons without feeling as if it's having its cake and eating it too? Do I only still like this manga as anything more than a complete train wreck because it's about reckoning with how you feel about a parent who made your life better and worse in equal measure after they've passed? I guess the only answer I can give is "maybe".

The Ichinose Family's Deadly Sins

The Ichinose Family's Deadly Sins by Taizan 5

Everyone's already talking about how Akane-banashi is Shounen Jump's new hotness, so leave it up to me to shout out another argument for why Shueisha's attempts to diversify Jump's portfolio are working out. Taizan 5, who previously brought you the heart-rending and mind-bending Takopi's Original Sin — a manga that can perhaps best be described as "Fairly Odd Parents from hell" — is admittedly not particularly skilled at the art of the layout. The structure of his stories is often messy, with flashbacks being especially hard to tell apart, yet what they lack in narrative transparency, they more than make up for in creativity and emotional strength. The Ichinose Family's Deadly Sins, about a family who simultaneously lose their memories in a traffic accident and have to piece back their identities from the clues left in the house they shared, is a thrilling and often vicious roller-coaster ride brought to life by vivid, expressive artwork and frequent, raw gut punches that recontextualize everything you've been reading up to this point. Whether this ambitious work will find a satisfactory way out of the spider's web of mysteries it is weaving remains to be seen, but in any case, I'm here to see it all unfold.

There's also some manga that don't even have five chapters out, but that I am pretty interested in, including:

  • My Crush's Crush (Boku no Suki na Hito ga Suki na Hito) by Aoi Sekina and Ryou Tsuzura: Some guy is in love with a girl, but she's in love with another girl, who's in love with the guy, but he doesn't know it. I'm only reading this because someone finally realized that a love triangle isn't a real triangle until at least someone is gay. Oh, and the art is cute.

  • Karakida-ke no Kosho Gurashi by Kei Toume: A sardonic college dropout and her sisters struggle to run a used bookstore in Tokyo's famous Kanda-Jinbouchou district. Author Kei Toume is best known for Sing "Yesterday" For Me, and this latest work delivers on all of the promises that story failed to live up to. Unfortunately, the age-gap romance is still there. Sigh.

  • Mujina into the Deep by Inio Asano: The mangaka who brought you Goodnight Punpun and Dead Dead Demons De De De De Destruction is doing what appears to be an action manga. I have no idea what is going on. It may or may not be about universal basic income. What else do you want?

Anyone else got anything worthwhile to recommend? Lemme know!


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