スーパーマリオくん 2

Volume 2 of Super Mario Kun keeps the Super Mario World arc going and it's still a ton of fun to see how they stretch pretty thin material into a whole series of stories. The humor is just as slapsticky and wild as in the first volume, and language-wise this one felt like it leaned even harder into puns, so it's still a bit on the tricky side even when it feels like it should be fairly easy material, and the brash, sometimes stilted battle dialogue can make sentence endings a bit tricky, though there wasn't anything grammar-wise that I couldn't parse without going over it a second time.

The stories are still enjoyable, there weren't any of the more character-driven bits like the Monty Mole story in the first volume, but the comedy scenarios are solid. Yoshi going on a diet was fun and I like the story where you find out the family hierarchy of Bullet Bills (Banzai Bill is actually the mom, those cannons with the skull face on them are the dad, and the regular sized bullets are the children). The tone is still wild and crude, though never goes too far to become unpleasant. I do like how hard they emphasize in this volume that when Mario kills an enemy, they dead for real. One of my favorite things about this series is how many creative transformations and abilities the author comes up with for Mario while trying to still feel like real power-ups, and he even predicts the mini-mushroom about a decade and a half before New Super Mario Bros finally did it.

Another standout was the final chapter, where they do a run through Mario's earlier adventures not just including the mainline games, but also all his cameos in various other titles, including an involved extended gag about SimCity. The biggest bombshell from this chapter is probably when they call Mario a "Tokyo-Born Latin-kei". I don't think they're literally trying to say Mario is Latino since earlier on Donkey Kong makes a comment about how much he hates Italians (proving the long-standing theory that Donkey Kong is screamingly racist), but it'd be funny if some hack clickbait listicle writer took it like that and did some article like "THE SHOCKING MANGA REVEALS MARIO IS LATINO". That bit sent me down a rabbit hole and Italian is considered a Latin language, but Italians themselves are not considered ethnically Latin. Since the bit is actually running through his game appearances and saying he made his first appearance in literal arcades, I think it's more about the external history of the character, but imagine if Mario was literally a hispanic guy born in a Tokyo arcade, really makes you think, huh?

Sawada's art continues to be delightful and every page immerses you in that glorious 90's Golden Age of Mario, and Nintendo by extension. Sawada toes the line between that classic feel and his own interpretation and every page is a joy to look at. These are still a bit tricky, but it's always rewarding.