welcome datacomp

Remember that time I did this in February and I thought that maybe I’d do this once a month? Man, I’m a funny guy. Anyway, as part of my plan to clean up/out my nerdy crap from my house before I leave to Glorious Nippon for a year of education and debauchery I figured I’d give some of the manga that’s been lying around my place a review before I leave all my earthly belongings behind / try to pawn it off on you suckers (keep an eye on this webspace in the coming weeks for more on that!). Oh, and rather than doing a bunch of reviews at once, I’m going to actually split these up in a futile attempt to get more page views. anyway this introduction is already longer than it should be so

Neko Ramen, Sonishi Kenji, vols 1 (2006) and 2 (2007)

This manga apparently has gotten not one but two seasons of flash-created Original Net Anime (what an unfortunate acronym) made out of it, so I figured that this would be worth reviewing. Anyway, obligatory plot summary:

A cat… that makes RAMEN??! This must be high-concept gag manga at its finest! Well, it got me to buy it at least.

Yeah, that’s about it. I know I shouldn’t have really expected too much from this, especially given my horrible track record with 4-koma (the genre needs more Ki-Sho-Ten-Ketsu-YAMI), but somehow I couldn’t help myself. I blame the Nekojiru kick I was on. Anyway, it’s about two volumes of roughly 4 jokes: the cat is bad at making ramen, the cat is bad at making business decisions, one of his three customers displays their character traits, the cat is a cat!! I do have to say in its defense, blasting through a volume of 4-koma gags is not really the optimal way to enjoy the form and genre, but still, this only got the occasional smile out of me. Incidentally, the parts of Neko Ramen that I found most interesting were the 16-page regular manga-style stories. They’re mostly little vignettes about Taisho, the eponymous neko, and his past, riffing off of generic manga backstories to somewhat comedic effect. These free up the story a bit, letting Sonishi play around outside of THERE IS A CAT. HE MAKES RAMEN. JOKETIME ENSUES., but they tend to not have any joke until the last page, and not in the shaggy dog Cromartie kind of way, either.

I checked out the net anime for this, too, hoping that somehow they could turn it around into something great, like the top-notch adaptation of Sketchbook’s snooze-inducing manga (which incidentally runs in the same magazine as this, remind me to stay away from it), but no dice. At least it’s free! (Like most, um, onanisms.) Overall, if you want a casual, light read (it’s got furigana!) and/or love cats doing goofy things, or happened to love the anime and think I’m completely misguided, I’d say to pick this up, but otherwise I’d recommend saving your yens.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 9:09 pm by kransom and is filed under manga, review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.