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Gintama

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 7 months ago

VideoNovelsMangaFeatures

Gintama

銀魂

  • by Sorachi Hideaki
  • serialized in Shonen Jump

Jump manga are expected to follow the three keywords: friendship, effort, and triumph.

The characters in Gintama...barely tolerate each other, and are friends purely to further their own self interest. They are all much too lazy to do anything beyond the minimum necessary to eat...unless someone pisses them off. They do occasionally manage to save the day...but this has yet to improve their lot in life in any noticeable fashion.

Gintama got off to a rocky start in Jump - lots of people, myself included, never read past the first issue. Kinda fugly art coming the week after fucking Death Note started, an off-beat, hard to get a handle on sense of humor, and that refusal to fit into the Jump mode...it quickly dropped to the back of the magazine, and according to the author himself people were slapping him on the back and promising he'd get a second chance.

But somewhere along the line (most people agree the introduction of the Shinsengumi, which secured him the hearts of the fujoshi, was critical) Gintama started to click. When the first volume was release, it sold out instantly, and Shueisha had to rush a second printing. That made headlines and got people like me back around for a second chance.

This entire book exists to be as inappropriate as the Jump editors will let them get. A cast of cynical, self-centered assholes, plots that seem to largely revolve around nightclubs, gangsters, whorehouses, and anything else sleazy they'll let him slip in...ads in stores proclaimed it the first Jump manga to have a heroine vomit, but the heart of the book's humor lay in the insanely snappy banter, with rapid fire dialogue that loops around for a callback when you least suspect it.

What initially seemed like a sort of half-assed setting "Aliens in Edo!" that he apparently had very little actual interest in exploit has, in fact, turned out to be the perfect venue to let Sorachi do whatever he wants. Spend a few weeks doing a dramatic arc for a change? Bad ass. Follow it up with a series of hilarious one shots? Make one of those randomly turn into another serious arc? End a serious arc with comedy again? Sweet. He can swing wildly from Akira style sci-fi alien fighting to the complete mundane (a genius issue parodied Death Note, with the characters scheming in captions over how to get the most yakiniku) to literally anything he damn well pleases. He's yet to strike a wrong note.

Andrew Cunningham

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