The manga this week
Pop Team Epic
By Bkub Okawa (Takeshobo)
It's my principle never to miss trendy things, so I introduce here the latest talk of the town -- "Pop Team Epic." An anime based on this manga has been airing since January, and it's enjoying an unusual, intriguing upsurge in popularity. It even caused an "incident" last month.
Animate's Akihabara store was giving away free face masks of Popuko, one of this manga's two main characters, on Jan. 21. However, a throng of fans rushed to get one and crowded the streets so much the shop was forced to stop handing out the freebie, deciding the situation was too dangerous. This is a perfect example of how information that sparks someone's interest can spread across social media at top speed, to the point of explosion.
"Pop Team Epic" is a series of four-panel manga of unimportant daily exchanges between two junior high school girls, Popuko and Pipimi. These characters look like those in four-panel "moe" manga, in which the protagonists are really cute girls.
A whole bunch of otaku-related parodies of manga, anime and video games are also said to be thrown in. Honestly speaking, I seldom know what the original sources are, so if I was asked if this manga is entertaining, I wouldn't know what to say.
One thing I felt, though, is that "Pop Team Epic" may be an updated version of the four-panel manga of the absurd that changed the then existing four-panel manga around 1990.
Manga artist Bkub Okawa's creative sense seems very similar to that of such manga artists as Sensha Yoshida and Shunji Enomoto, who caused shocking sensations. Their dry sensibilities seemed to say: "Those who can understand it will understand it -- that's good enough. I don't care about the rest." It's like that time is coming back, making me feel strangely nostalgic.
The anime version of "Pop Team Epic" is amazing, as it expresses the manga's radical sense of the absurd in a different way. The first half of the 30-minute program is a series of short jokes based on the original manga. A big surprise awaits us in the latter half, in which a subtitle says, "Rerun," and is followed by the exact same content shown in the first half. I was astonished for a second, and then realized that the voice-over team was different. No doubt, this is in itself a parody of what Netflix and some other film streaming services do quite often nowadays -- provide a new voice cast for foreign films (in other words, using different voice actors from the movie theater versions). This idea helps cut down on the anime production cost by half.
It's also impressive that the anime faithfully reflects the publishers masochistic sales pitch that Okawa's work is a "worthless manga that repeatedly reuses a lot of its own drawings." Also, those who can't take a joke might get frustrated, as people did with the original manga.
In a more than decadelong career, Okawa has published a wide variety of four-panel manga. It feels like the sudden popularity of "Pop Team Epic" may be overrated, but I hope the author makes use of this popularity to open up a new horizon of manga of the absurd.
Ishida is a Yomiuri Shimbun senior writer whose areas of expertise include manga and anime.
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