chapter 1: "Yotsuba & Moving" (19 July)
(I decided to go ahead with this now -- a chapter a day, read with attention. Feel free to play along, in comments or your own posts.)


chapter 1: The opening sets the tone: a guy and his young daughter in a flatbed loaded with boxes and furniture, driving through a new city. Counting the title page and TOC illustrations, that's all we get for eight pages, until they arrive on page 9. We don't care nothing's happening because the art's good, their interaction is funny, and we want to find out what kind of wierdo sheltered child doesn't know a school when she sees one. There's at least a couple solid smile moments and depending on your sense of humor one bemused chuckle. In short, we've got an enthusiastic world-is-new child and her dad doing everyday things together, and it's fun and funny.

The rest of the chapter does have a plot -- not much of one, but enough to hang some extended comic scenes: with the help of a family friend, they move into their new house, until like a distractible kitten the child wanders off, but with the help of the three girls next door, she's found and returned.

During which we see the world really is new to Yotsuba, with an ignorance of unworldly proportions. This will change in a few chapters, much as Yotusba's design will evolve, to a more ordinary childishness, but for now we have exaggeration for comic effect. Not recognizing a school (or what a grade is) was bizarre enough, but a swing? Well, okay, we can accept that exaggeration because the scene is damn funny, just as we accept her belated memories of Stranger Danger. But then, in the end, not knowing that she and her father were moving? It creates the funniest scene yet, as the climax ought to be, but given the goodbyes there would have been at the start of the trip (later we learn they had been living with Koiwai's mother) it's just not possible. Comedy has been allowed priory over storytelling. It's a story by a comic master, but hardly realistic, and in that sense not representative of what's to come.

And Azuma is clearly a master of his form. Take page 11: there's three overlapping, but never confusing, conversations -- Yotsuba and Jumbo, Koiwai and Jumbo literally talking over Yotsuba's head, and Yotsuba's intrusion into the latter. The third panel is especially good -- a child inappropriately repeating something she's heard adults say is funny, but her saying "You've grown!" to the ginormous guy makes it funnier. Note also how the men talk and snark like old friends, and Koiwai returning the truck keys to Jumbo. The whole page is damn good writing, and Azuma repeats the trick several times -- most notably in the comic timing of the final reveal. There's a few stumbles but enough craft and confidence to pull you on.

A few scattered notes:

• While Koiwai may, as Fuka's reaction suggests, be slightly too laid back about Yotusba's wandering off, Japanese children really are much more free-range than, say, American kids.
• Jumbo really needed to reappear in the final scene -- without him, the story arc's unbalanced, even if he wouldn't fit in the final jokes (again, comedy taking priority over story).
• Like Yotsuba, Asagi also doesn't quite have her final character design, and I wonder whether the Ena of, say, volume 4 would really have walked by the park without stopping to help the strange girl, but otherwise everyone else is much as they will be for the rest of the series (to order of elaborating their characters).

And finally do not, O best beloved, forget that "no good" Yanda guy.

---L.