Goodnight Punpun Review

The formal joke is the entire argument. Asano renders apartment blocks, convenience stores and riverbanks with photographic density, then draws his protagonist as four lines and a beak, and the effect is that the reader stops seeing a character and starts occupying one. It also means the book can show Punpun doing something unforgivable while the drawing still reads as harmless, which is a cruelty no realistically drawn face could pull off.

Asano's control of register is exceptional across thirteen volumes. The comedy is genuinely funny, the cult subplot is observed rather than mocked, and Aiko is written with enough interiority that the relationship reads as two damaged people rather than a boy and his symptom. The backgrounds are the best draughtsmanship in modern seinen.

Against that, the book is relentless, and the accusation that it mistakes accumulation of misery for insight lands on at least the final third, where several turns exist mainly to hurt. World building is thin because the setting is only ever a mood. Reader scores put it among the highest rated seinen in the medium and the formal invention is why it earns that.