ギャルと恐竜 1

I always do enjoy a good "zany living situation" manga and this one is very cute. A girl randomly finds a dinosaur in her house and they both just roll with it like nothing is unusual. The dinosaur is very funny, it never speaks but has hilarious expressions. I like that he's not humanized to the point of say, Bugs Bunny, where it's basically a human shaped like an animal but he's still sentient enough that he understands what's going on. The dinosaur moves about town with purpose, but you don't always know what that purpose is which gives him that inscrutable comedic layer. He reminds me a lot of the geese I see around town, they're clearly smart and they're up to something, but you never quite know what.

The language is very easy and I generally got through most of it without lookups. I did have to figure out the use of ウケる as sort of a spoken version of "LOL" and one chapter revolves around the characters watching an apparently real Japanese cop show but even there the gag is less about the reference and more about them trying to figure out who the criminal is. They also balance out the culture references with a shot of them watching Breaking Bad so there is one the westerners will get.

Really funny and easy to read

The unexplained dinosaur roommate is such a funny concept, and each of the short chapters shows a new hilarious situation. I was hooked.

The language is pretty simple with nice big text, and the visual storytelling makes it fairly easy to follow what’s going on. There’s some casual speech but nothing too indecipherable, and full furigana makes lookups easy. I liked that the fast-paced humor lended itself to getting through more content faster, as opposed to carefully slogging through something like I usually do.

Overall I’m thrilled to have found something this entertaining at this reading level.