Oct 14, 2023
*the mildest of spoilers for an early character's introduction scene, a different early character's primary motivation, and an off-hand mention to what chapter number a major arc ends on*
you ever watch a show on like, paleontology or something, dinosaurs, and the dude takes some animal’s partial skeleton, like just a small skull fragment, and half a jaw bone, and then somehow uses that to completely extrapolate an entire animal out of that? like full skeleton, muscle structure, organs, even like, behaviors and such?
“oh yeah, because it’s skull was shaped like this, we can figure out that it ate this and that and probably lived
...
like this,” just like, mind-blowing shit?
reading the Bocchi the Rock manga after coming off of the Bocchi the Rock anime feels like rediscovering those fragmented skeleton bits and going “damn they really made a whole dinosaur out of this?”
at first anyway, I think that it really comes into its own, not only in terms of both authorial direction and craft, but also fan translation-wise as well, after the first volume and a half. which is, funnily enough, immediately where the anime ends, but we’ll get into that I suppose.
like a lot of people, Bocchi the Rock came out of nowhere and rocked my socks off, and then, like a lot less people, I went to go check out the manga afterwards. I had never read a 4koma before, so I had virtually zero meaningful engagement with the format before reading Bocchi, and I honestly wasn’t -really- sure how to wrap my head around it conceptually? like on paper I can see the format and ‘get’ the idea, but like, serialized storytelling in this 4 panel format? do tell. like sure, I guess I was vaguely familiar with newspaper comic strips, and there are quite a few examples of them that do long-term storytelling through them, something like Funky Winkerbean being like, an extreme example of something that started as 4-panel gags that veers extremely hard into 4-panel drama, in a way that seemed kind of ridiculous from the isolated strips I saw of it online, but even then its not something I ever actually read.
I guess for the contemporary american comic reader that was born long after the golden age of newspaper comics(???), and had never really dipped her toes into manga before, something like webcomics offered a lot of that similar structural framework of like, gag-a-day stuff and genuine long-form storytelling, but I’m at a Loss to think of any of them that handled doing it particularly well. except for like, Blind Alley, which is a great 4-panel webcomic, though one focuses-in way more on like, mood and tone than going all in on gags all the time. and the confidence that that work has in being able to just let its strips breathe and sit with themselves the way they do, sometimes with multiple strips in a row flowing through without dialogue or jokes, is something that always sticks with me about it.
but the point being that outside of that, I had no practical experience or expectations for what to expect from a 4koma, so I was excited to learn about it through Bocchi the Rock the manga. and I wanna preface this by saying that I mean this in the most loving way possible, but it seems that the author was really struggling to get it too?
and its hard for me to judge this accurately, since the only way to read this in english at the time of writing is through a fan translations on your manga-scanlation reading platform of choice that started out, maybe less than stellar. and for the vast majority of the comic online, the english fan translation of BtR was handled by one person by themselves? (this is apparently normal, forgive me I’m not on the up and up on how the fan translation scene works) and this is the part where the whole experience of trying to read this thing swerves into something that I found much more interesting at that point than the actual work itself. because the whole like, I guess, apparatus surrounding it that lets me being able to read this story in english is like, really, really messy?
BtR starts out the gate with like, breakneck speed, its a 4koma so that means you structure the whole thing around your 4-panel punchlines, right? but the punchlines, while they are the same ones from the show, flow so like, cosmically different, that the whole thing doesn’t really hit as it should. the pacing of the comic feels like someone viciously edited out all the quiet moments, so there's no like, valleys or slopes, only peaks and spikes. so it feels less like the naturalistic, rapid fire comedy that’s constantly sprinkled throughout the show, and more like a 30 second youtube video of just the punchlines of every joke rapidly fired out of a cannon, like the DNA is there, but nothing that makes it into a full body. and because of the 4-panel format, the whole comic is forced to anchor its entire pacing on the weight of its jokes that are written as quickfire breezy things that somehow have neither the build-up or punchiness to really play to that 4-panel format, nor the room to let them breathe due to the fact that this is a serialized story that has narrative beats its trying to hit in ten pages per chapter, and by golly, its gonna hit them like fucking Bocchi-themed whack-a-mole.
and this extends not just to the jokes, but to the more serious moments too. Hiroi’s introduction is an example that sticks out in my mind, her defining establishing moment where she stops goofing around and gives Hitori a genuine heart-to-heart to stop her from selling her guitar after Hitori lied to her and said that she gave up on learning it, that is like -a moment- in the show, its its own little scene. in the manga it is exactly two short sentences that take up one panel, because there is absolutely no time or room to stop and let this moment play out; and its also panel 3 of 4, so its not even the climax of the page? its buildup to the weak joke of Hitori revealing that she was lying about selling her guitar actually, which is the wind-down to that scene in the anime, not the climax of the scene like in the comic. there is a real sense of tension at play as the author seems to struggle to figure out, in real time, how exactly to tell the story she wants to tell in this particular format that reverberates loudly throughout the first volume of the manga. this idea the early issues have that every 4-panel strip needs to facilitate one, or even multiple, jokes, no matter the cost, while also trying to tell a whole story at a feverish pace, belays a prickly nervousness in the storytelling that just makes the whole thing feel like sonic the hedgehog is punching me in the face.
and none of this is helped by the fan translation, which starts...rough. I’m not saying this just to be mean to the translator at the start of this project, which appears to be a passion project (what fan translation isn’t I guess? idk, yell at me if there's a whole lucrative industry behind scanlations actually, I'm ignorant here). their first upload of the comic was in 2019, and it appears that they’re using it to teach themselves how to better learn japanese? there's a lot of odd phrasing and weird sentence structure, as well as maybe strange translations for things that have multiple meanings? the thing I remember the most is when Kita is explaining why she joined the band in the first place, which is to get closer to another band member so she could try and date her. this is translated in the show per Crunchyroll's subs as “I wanted to join Kessoku Band and become Senpai’s girl!” (girl meaning girlfriend); whereas in the manga, its written as “I wanted to join Kessoku Band and become Senpai’s daughter!” which is a vastly freakier thing, but rock on girl. but yeah, on the whole it was not really helping the comedy, which despite its reputation as a funny faces work, is mostly focused around its snippy dialogue and the interactions between people, to really have the writing be this kind of thing that is as much of a learning experience as it is that is meant to showcase a work to other people. not that I’m like, denouncing the effort or anything, that sounds like a really cool idea to do if you wanna try and hit like, really practical experience trying to learn a language by yourself.
and I do wanna point out that everything I wrote so far just covers the first like, 20 chapters or so, which is meatier than it sounds. from the way the 4koma is paced and structured, everything that it wants to hit feels very like, condensed and packed in like a collapsing star or something, which makes the act of reading the whole thing feel very like, fibrous. like one chapter feels like a full thing in the same way that say like, eating a protein bar is a full thing, despite it only being like 10 pages long, that still like, 20 strips of jokes. the whole thing really feels stuffed to the brim, which just makes the jaggedness of it all stick out that much more.
but yeah, so the whole thing was a struggle between all three parties: author, translator, and reader, as we’re all swirling around in a big washing machine trying to figure out, in practice, what the fuck a 4koma is. and despite everything I wrote, I’ll be honest, I found the whole experience to be really endearing. there's a fascination, and a charm in reading something that is like, imperfect in ways that the people making it are like, actively trying to work out and making strives to improve that comes across in the pages, and the whole experience as like, anime paleontology is always a bit fun to do.
and whattaya' know they all get better. around chapter 12 (episode 8 in the anime, you know the one) the author manages to figure out how to really sell the big dramatic moments and let them breathe, that is to suddenly switch formats to a traditionally paneled comic to give themselves the freedom to play with pacing, space, and like, impact. but outside of that, the pacing of the regular 4koma panels also improve and relax as the high-strung tension of constant gags calms down a bit into something that feels a bit more casual, a bit more conversational, and slowly becomes something that becomes the sort of comedy that can actually play it it a bit naturalistically, even when it pops off, which is much more suiting to the jokes its telling. the same goes for its narrative storytelling too, it also gains that confidence to just let things breathe and give its non-jokey moments the space they need to hit, and the work as a whole just becomes so much more comfortable with itself and what it wants to do. chapters that spring to mind for that are like, chapters 29 and 45 (chapter 45 is the like, final chapter at the end of a major arc so like, spoilers I guess, don’t jump to that one immediately haha).
the translation also improves with it as well, the dialogue becomes a lot more cohesive and natural, the jokes become much more sharp and well-timed. the entire project has this like, really nice, upward momentum of quality as both the author and translator both improve their craft in a way that measurably shows in the work itself, and the Bocchi the Rock manga ends up in a place that, appropriately, feels very like, warm. I get a fuzzy feeling thinking about it.
and maybe, weirdly enough, reading on through those later chapters bring something the anime does into a kind of surprising clarity. since a lot of the early jankiness of the manga ends immediately, almost comically so, at the ending point of the anime, the thing that the anime ends up doing is kind of bridging that gap between the first part of the manga and the rest of the manga. where it like, brings the opening chapters up to the same level of quality that the latter parts of it have, in a way that feels like, really cohesive. like its one of those situations where you can finish the anime and then immediately pick up the manga and keep going (chapter 22 incase you’re wondering) and there’ll be a minimal difference in vibe, its kind of wild honestly. and also as an added bonus, any of the possible question you could’ve had regarding Bocchi and her relationship to the band at the end of the anime are again, answered almost immediately in the next chapter as the conflict of the next major arc, again, there's that sort of weird immediacy after the anime cut off, kinda' funny. but I do think its worthwhile going through those opening 20 or so chapters, first volume and a half, just because I think that upward progression in storytelling on all fronts is really interesting to see and also really resonates deeply with BtR's thematic substance too.
but yeah uhhh, she's Bocchi the Rock?? put some goddamn respect on the name, its quite good, I feel. I originally planned on finishing this review a long time before the official english release came out, but as I’m writing this, I got the email that the first volume of the official english release of the manga has shipped out to me. so I had to hightail it over to my writing folder to prioritize this dang thing, since a lot of it hinged on the experience of reading the fan translation, since that was (currently is? at time of writing???) the only available way to read it in english, and honestly, I think that the translator is worth the kudos? idk, while i am curious how the overall vibe of that first volume will change with an official translation, there's still a lot of volumes after the first one that won’t be available for like, years and years, so like fucking uhhh, don’t be afraid to check out the scans afterwards, they out here, they putting in the work, they're pretty good!
oh, also uh, if you made it to the end and you’re like ‘ah, ill pass on the manga’ but you also like the anime, you should at the very least check out chapter 16, its like the only extended bit from the manga that was cut out of the anime, and that's seemingly only because it would've just landed smack dab in the middle of episode 10 and completely annihilate the pacing. but its a very funny chapter, the way that the comedy layers on top of itself as two characters start to break down as they're trying to course correct a situation that just keeps kind of falling apart as everyone else around them refuses to help is just peak Bocchi, to me, personally.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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