{"id":109,"date":"2008-07-03T21:09:53","date_gmt":"2008-07-04T02:09:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/2008\/07\/03\/manga-review-neko-ramen\/"},"modified":"2008-07-03T21:09:53","modified_gmt":"2008-07-04T02:09:53","slug":"manga-review-neko-ramen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/2008\/07\/03\/manga-review-neko-ramen\/","title":{"rendered":"Manga Review: Neko Ramen"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Remember that time I did this in February and I thought that maybe I&#8217;d do this once a month? Man, I&#8217;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&#8217;d give some of the manga that&#8217;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&#8217;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<\/p>\n<p><b><u>Neko Ramen<\/u>, Sonishi Kenji, vols 1 (2006) and 2 (2007)<\/b><\/p>\n<p>This manga apparently has gotten <a href=\"http:\/\/www.animenewsnetwork.com.au\/news\/2008-07-01\/second-neko-rahmen-comedy-anime-project-green-lit\">not one but two<\/a> 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:<\/p>\n<p>A cat&#8230; that makes RAMEN??! This must be high-concept gag manga at its finest! Well, it got me to buy it at least. <\/p>\n<p>Yeah, that&#8217;s about it. I know I shouldn&#8217;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&#8217;t help myself. I blame the Nekojiru kick I was on. Anyway, it&#8217;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 <u>Neko Ramen<\/u> that I found most interesting were the 16-page regular manga-style stories. They&#8217;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.  <\/p>\n<p>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 <u>Sketchbook<\/u>&#8216;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&#8217;s free! (Like most, um, onanisms.)  Overall, if you want a casual, light read (it&#8217;s got furigana!) and\/or love cats doing goofy things, or happened to love the anime and think I&#8217;m completely misguided, I&#8217;d say to pick this up, but otherwise I&#8217;d recommend saving your yens. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Remember that time I did this in February and I thought that maybe I&#8217;d do this once a month? Man, I&#8217;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&#8217;d give some of the manga that&#8217;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!).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-manga","category-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/2chan.us\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}