CR Review: Azumanga Daioh Omnibus



Creators: Kiyohiko Azuma
Publishing Information: ADV Manga, soft cover, 686 pages, November 2007, $24.99
Ordering Numbers: 9781413903645 (ISBN13)

The best things about Kiyohiko Azuma's high school comedy are its tone -- sweet with just enough of an edge that everything goes down smoothly -- and the balance with which Azuma has built his characters. Because they are constructed from a series of overlapping qualities (two or three of the characters relate to sports in a unique way, for instance; while there's a smartest one, that doesn't mean academics doesn't play a role with other characters) and an offbeat factor or two (one characters loves but is hated by cats) instead of each one stuffed into a brightly emblazoned unique role in the manner of a North American entertainment, our initial sense of the main characters (Sakaki, Kagura, Chiyo, Tomo, Yomi and Osaka; teachers Yukari and Nyamo) feels real. They are neither too out-sized nor too ordinary; no one's eccentricities cross the line into disruption. Reading the gags, then, feels like spending time around a pleasant group of children as opposed to being forced into the company of a horrible group of child actors.

Azumanga Daioh's clever, ongoing piece of slight of hand is that both the spare setting and the outside events brought to bear in the four-panel vertical strips (yonkoma) feel greater than what is actually depicted because they are filtered through the careful interplay between each scene's actors. Those interactions legitimize what might otherwise seem like elements of an arbitrary trudge through a school calendar. Azuma developed his ability to depict extreme emotions fairly early on: things like shock and jealousy and worry are well portrayed here. Where he'll find a worlds to explore in those emotions in the subsequent Yotsuba&!, here's it's mostly a comedic effect, but a smart one. By the final fourth of this massive collection -- almost 700 pages for $25 in an omnibus collection that many hope will catch on -- you even start to see characters find growth, but in the realistic way of incremental exposure to a problem mitigated by friends and outside experience rather than through a more standard drama's catharsis followed by enlightenment.

All that in its favor, Azumanga Daioh still feels like a first major work. There are elements that don't seem a part of the grander narrative. A lot of humor with the teachers, while funny and endearing, never quite seems to fit in with the kid-driven material in a comedic or thematic sense. Some of the characters could be more sharply drawn -- literally, too, as initial sympathies might lie with some of the characters that are different physically to a greater degree because it's easier to follow them around the pages. Azumanga Daioh may not transcend its comedic sub-genre, and may remain a pleasant work rather than a thrilling one, but it fills a book with a kind of comfortable, affectionate humor that you don't see a lot of anywhere anymore.


 
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