山本アヒルの実録4コマ 1

This caught my eye because of the duck character and it turned out to be a pretty interesting experience as far as gag manga goes. The each gag is supposedly based on something the author experienced in real life, since his name is Ahiru, he represents himself as a duck and hangs out with his best friend, who is a grain of rice.

The humor is dry, sarcastic, and even leans into anti-humor at times, which might not be to everyone's liking, but I think the strips really hit a good stride for me about 30 pages. If this really is stuff he's actually done, he's truly a mad lad and a number of these did get me to bust out laughing.

Language-wise this was kind of a surprising read. There is furigana on everything and for the first half, I barely had to make any lookups at all which was satisfying and kind of surprising given the humor is a bit raunchy at times even though the vocab and grammar is pretty simple (I did find a unique symbol though, 〆, which doesn't seem to be considered kanji or kana). Around the three-quarters mark, the book shifts to some strips he drew from before he quit his job and those are a bit more wordy with some more advanced words so the shift caught me off guard a bit bit it was manageable. Even though each strip is a self-contained gag there is kind of a progression in his quest to get published and it does make me want to seek out his other manga (this is apparently his first published volume but he does seem to have other stuff out by now including a second volume of these "true tales")

The final quarter of the book steps away from the "true stories" format to present what I'm guessing are the original gag strips and these are even more surreal and bizarre than the rest of the book, to the point where even if you understand the words there's a chance you just might not get the joke. Sometimes it's because there's a cultural thing (I spent about 20 minutes parsing what turned out to be a sex pun based on a local supermarket chain's name), and sometimes it's just because it really is that weird. It sort of turns into twitter meme humor at a point (to the point that Salt Bae makes two appearances) but the jokes that do land are very funny. My biggest issue in the latter half of the book is that there's sometimes some very small squiggly writing that I just couldn't make out (to be fair to the author, I l checked out some versions of these strips he posts on twitter and those are much, much higher resolution than the ebook I bought from Honto) but it's usually for offhand comments rather than the main gag of the strip.

While not every gag lands and there's a couple that are a bit sexist by western standards, the short nature of each one means that if a joke doesn't hit you move right onto the next one and there is a lot of funny stuff here. I think reading these also drives home how concise Japanese can be compared to English, there were a few strips where I thought "this is hilarious, I should translate it and show my friends", but even when the joke remained intact, any translation I could come up with was so much wordier that it loses its punchiest. My favorite gag was one where he keeps sniffing his own foot for no reason and going "あしくさい！" which was really funny, but playing it back as "my feet stink!" just doesn't have the same impact.

This proved to be a bit trickier to untangle than my first impression led me to believe, but it was satisfying and there is some really funny material that's not too hard to get into. I don't think it will be to everyone's taste but if you like slapstick or otherwise unusual humor it's a good time and I want to read the second volume.