Crayon Shinchan 1

You know, I’ll always remember this as the series that made me really shocked that Comics One folded.  They promoted this series fairly strenuously, to the point that I thought it was really popular, and then they… stopped releasing pretty much everything.  Apparently it just wasn’t as popular as Iron Wok Jan.  Not that I read this back then, I’m just saying.

Anyway.  This is another one of those series like The Gorgeous Life of Strawberry-chan and All Nippon Airline that I bet reads much better as little spacers between chapters of other things.  This series is composed of 4-page stories full of gags, and while the volume is sectioned off (two sections back to back for stories about Shin and his mother, and another section for Shin at school), there is absolutely no continuity whatsoever save for the fact Shin gets a dog at one point.  I read a big chunk at first and really didn’t like it, then I broke the rest up over the course of several days and liked it much better.

I feel a little bad reading this right after Strawberry-chan, because I just like the one with the frog better, and the comparison clung to this one the entire time I was reading it.  While both series repeat jokes, I felt like Shin-chan did it a little more frequently, and I didn’t like the humor as much.  I mean, there’s only so many times that Shin can make his mom mad and still be funny, but that was part of the reason I started reading only a few of the stories at a time.  Notably, only one of the comics finishes with Shin’s mother not angry at him.  Most of the jokes are okay, and there are a few really good ones sprinkled intermittently throughout.  I was fond of the number of ways Shin found to include his penis as part of a picture he drew on his stomach, but your milage may vary.  Most of the jokes are sort of crude humor like that, so if that’s not your thing, then, well… you may want to break out the Jose Saramago or whatever instead.

It is funny, though.  It made me think of the “Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga” strip that’s posted in this entry at the Overlooked Manga Festival.  It’s exactly like the 4-koma comic you should not do, and it’s got sort of the same new joke in every panel flavor.

I like the book itself, which is much shorter than a regular manga volume (around 120 pages) and included several color pages at the beginning.  I don’t think I could read more than 120 pages of this at a stretch, even with it spaced out like I did, so the length of the volume is a wise decision.