When you think of Manga, what comes to mind, Naruto? Attack on Titan? Pokemon? Those series are good in their own right, but they all follow a certain formula. Protagonist is different/special in someway, sometimes a loner, but wants to get stronger and have a power deep inside them that needs to be awakened. The best, like no one ever was.  Oh and they have a quiet, dark, edgy sidekick.

Inio Asano is different. He crafts stories in a very down to earth way, creating meaningful, and relatable characters. Although his work Solanin got him some notoriety in the west, the work that has got everyone talking is Good Night PunPun.

Without giving away spoilers, (the ending had me close to tears) the basic Plot is about PunPun Onodera’s life. Starting when he is 11 and ending when he is 22. He is represented as a duck, normally, however in certain parts this representation changes- at one point to a tetrahedron- why does this happen? Read the manga and find out.

Goodnight PunPun deals with themes of depression, relationships and love. PunPun throughout the Manga has very deep, dark thoughts which serve as a narration along with another narrator that appears to PunPun and normally egging him on to do the darkest thing in a situation. Later on he says nothing but only appears in panels. He is God.

For me, at some points I feel like I can really empathise with PunPun, the reason being is because of how well written he is, and not just him, every character has depth. I am a fan of Manga that subverts the main expectations, Takehiko Inoue, and Naoki Urasawa are other good examples of this, but the reason I like Asano’s work so much is because his stories are never really about anything, they are just about people, living their lives, and sometimes those lives don’t have meaning, and that’s a scary thing to think about, but everyone does. Everyone thinks about where their life is going, where they are now, we are told not to do that, but anyone who talks about living in the now is probably, and I hate to say this if you are one of these people, full of shit. We all have worries, even those people. Asano realises this and crafts a story around that very idea, but at the same time that story is just peoples lives. If you don’t want to read Goodnight PunPun, a shorter series he did (2 volumes) is called A girl on the shore, dealing again with the same themes Good NightPunPun does, but perhaps in a more cryptic way.

The art is another good example of subverting expectations, Asano uses photo backgrounds, but draws over them to make them look like the photo has been drawn like the characters, which all have a realistic style as far as manga goes, except for PunPun himself who is a simplistic Bird Sketch, for most of the manga anyway, we are given hints to what he really looks like, but only bread crumbs.

I love manga that have art styles that are realistic,  especially when they compliment the seriousness of the story.

This doesn’t mean the artist is subjected to small panels. Quite the contrary, as I mentioned before, Asano uses photos as backgrounds, but also uses digital media to his advantage, In some scenes the whole page is patterns, or even the lay out of a page is different and interesting to look at. Text is all over the place creating an interesting page layout. He uses technology to his advantage and then some.

Asano just released an 8 chapter mini series on what it means to be a Manga author who is not passionate about his craft, called Downfall. Asano’s usual themes pop up here too, but the characters are so different that it doesn’t matter. He uses those themes as a spring board and then starts creating. And that’s why he influences me, his work shows that their is a market for mature stories that deal with issues that people can relate too. Everytime I read one of his works I finish it and think “shit, I wanna start drawing a comic again” I’ve had an idea for a comic dealing with breakups and depression for a while now, but I never get around to doing it for whatever reason. But seeing someone like Asano motivates me to at least start. It leaves me thinking too, about life, and where I am and where I’m going, which for a manga to do is brilliant.