Gintama Review

The structure is unlike anything else at this length. Sorachi alternates between weeks of pure gag work, in which the characters mock their own magazine, their editor and the conventions of the format, and long serious arcs about a lost war, a dying old order and the people who chose the wrong side of both. That the two modes share a cast should not function, and it does, because the jokes establish the affection the serious arcs then spend.

The comedy is dense with references that age at very different speeds, and a reader without the context loses perhaps a third of it. The art starts rough and becomes genuinely strong by the middle volumes, particularly in the swordwork. The run is too long, several arcs repeat their own structure, and the toilet humour is relentless enough to end the book for some readers inside the first volume. What it does at its peak, across the Yoshiwara, Shogun assassination and final war arcs, is deliver payoffs built on setup laid hundreds of chapters earlier.