I was supposed to talk about movies

I’m getting tired of writing and thinking and talking about movies and filmmaking.  Even though is what I’m studying, I don’t like movies that much, I don’t watch too many movies either and I find boring to now write about it. I’m gloomy today, sorry, bad sleep – bad mood.  Although I have some movies I love on my list, I’ve talked about them so many times that I decided I’m actually going to blog about Oyasumi Punpun, a manga* I’m currently reading. After all, this is my blog, right?

Asano Inio started Oyasumi Punpun in 2007, I first started reading her work when I was 15 years old, but by that time, there were only a few volumes. I decided to resume my reading this year, and it all makes so much sense right now that I’ve been through a lot. The manga is still being published every month.

Asano’s work is very much on the dark side, has a very deep and rather pessimists critique to humanity;  religion, money issues, death, suicide,  social constructions around “love”, relationships,  family structure etc... Asano also came out as a transgender woman this year, which explains a lot of her artwork and the constant references to phallic shaped characters. So I’m glad I had the chance to “read” her artwork while going to college and being a little bit older.

In Oyasumi Punpun, Punpun is a phallo like character that lives with his family in a “broken home”, his mother was a teen mom who is now facing a mid-life crisis and his dad is a male chauvinistic dreamer who desperately wants to get away from his duty as a father. Punpun also has an uncle, who plays a big role in his late childhood.  The manga, surprisingly, goes through all Punpuns life. It starts with him in school, then high school and then college, and we can see how this non-human figure goes through all this different process that make him who he is “at the end”.

To me, this is Asano’s best work so far, I read Solanin (another manga from the author, which was also made into a movie) and it does have many things in common with her late publications. Solanin has only 2 volumes, in which you can see a fully constructed story of a boy a girl, love and relationships, death and suicide, but if I could compare it to Oyasumi Punpun, the most representative aspect of this work last mentioned, is that is still being published, and this means it is in a constant construction. Directly related to what Asano tries to represent in her overall artwork.

Oyasumi Punpun is, visually, a great experience. For those who use to read manga, you can notice its particular cinematography. Manga itself has a very similar structure to movies, in terms of language. Even though it’s drawn, it changes the speed, the mood; you can actually hear music coming out of it.

The uses of perspective are very amusing. The picture above is like the “master” take (what we would call it) and then the second one takes place a few pages later, the same characters are now distant to each other, after a heated conversation, and this is built from the perspective, in the picture itself, the narrative is not being given by what the characters say, but by the image itself is telling us.

It's hard to pick just one thing I like about it, even harder to think about one I don't like. Maybe Asano Inio's work depresses me so much, that I would find hard to say she is my favorite mangaka*, but Oyasumi Punpun is definitely first on my top 10 favs. things of all the world. 

*Manga is like a comic, it’s Japanese and it has a distinctive format.

*Mangaka is the author of the manga