Finished reading Oyasumi Punpun yesterday and I think it's hard to know where to begin. On one hand, it's obviously this artistically very realized portrayal of a world and its characters, and Asano Inio is a really solid writer who is really good at *suggesting* emotions and contours to these people using very small, simple scenes. It's very ambitiously thematically as it tries to articulate, through manga, the drudge and messiness of everyday living, the way cycles of abuse can be perpretated without meaning to, the way love (or lack of love) can turn these children into distorted adults, the tension between living altruistically and selfishly to survive, the way the potential for cruelty and kindness exist inside every living person, the way it plays around more conventional manga tropes, etc. Like it's clearly the work of someone who is very skilled.
(And, to be honest, I think Asano Inio isn't credited for pulling these skills that are kind of more 'invisible' in making comics? The way he paces the action around one chapter, and around one volume is great. Most chapters of Punpun have a clear beginning-middle-end, and you can kind of pull back to some of the most important ones after the work is done)
But I think what I'm more interested in are some of the thematic implications of the manga, which might be unitentional even to its creator. Just picking one of them, I think it's interesting to notice how often the 'abuse' in Punpun is framed as a woman damaging a man (the girl who crashes into Uncle Yuiichi's class; Punpun's mom; Midori to Punpun; Aiko's mom). It seems that a thematic underpining of Punpun ends up being the way some women live 'selfishly' and damage others around their life. By the end, the manga seems to have a more positive, almost nostalgic view of Punpun's dad (who was a deadbeat, a drunk and a domestic abuser) than Punpun's mom.
I say this, and I think there's a grain of truth to it, but, also, I feel like the manga is comfortable slipping into this world of moral grey-areas with its characters and story. In a way, it wants us readers to make our mind on who these people are, and it does devote an entire volume (one of the most important ones, I think) to Punpun's mother and how she is a survivor too and so on.
What I want to finish on is that it's obviously a very unique, intriguing and well-done manga, and I want to discuss it with more people, and I think talking about its intentional and unitentional themes is really rewarding.
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Umuba tiene 33 añitos 🫣
Cosplay del manga llamado Mujina in to the deep del autor Asano Inio
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