Netsutai no Citron

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Tropical Citron opens with a great page, charting the descent of a few bombs into a jungle below and transitioning to the bubbly insides of a glass of water in front of a TV showing a mushroom cloud explosion.

There are many great transitions like this in the story. The composition is superb. There is that trademark Matsumoto black humour flowing throughout as we go from one panel to another, the comedic flourishes juxtaposing perfectly.

The story is surreal to the point where the suited dude with the horse's head from another Matsumoto manga makes a cameo appearance here and you don't blink. Soma, ... our plucky photographer, is hell-bent on getting to Vietnam because that's where all the action is but instead ends up Through the Looking Glass as it were, thanks to a literary reference, but more due to vast quantities of Rabbit Juice.

This addictive soda pop is all the rage, or to quote a random character "popular among lunatics and the young" and is turning people into junkies frothing at the mouth or slack-jawed zombies. Its other affect is to distort reality and send characters through wacky adventures with psychopaths chasing them with sharp pointy objects.

Tropical Citron does eventually regain a semblance of a plot that drives it towards a satisfying climax and genuinely touching resolution. It's got a pretty laughable premise holding it together, involving witchcraft and aliens, but in the grand scheme of things it's not very important at all; just a device to keep things in motion. What’s important in this manga is the journey. The characteristic art, the world and specific culture its set in, the quirky humour, the brazen 'wtf' factor; it’s a slapstick adventure with a cast of humorous misfits and many hilarious scenes, panels and payoffs.

Mako. The professor. Sorceresses. Rabbit Juice. Dimensional pockets. Jabberwocky. The old man. Soldiers. The Rabbit. Trash. Tempura. The Leica. Slaves. The Horse. A perfect world. Silver bullets. Revolution. Witches. The Hunter. Vietnam. Kittens. Read Tropical Citron to find out.

Vice influenced hallucinatory journey which draws inspiration from Alice in Wonderland. Frustration is to be expected with first few chapters as little elucidation is offered and it remains borderline nonsensical. However, the pay off is worthy.

Matsumoto's art is as sketchy and vivacious at the same time. Perfectly suits his aberrant narrative style. Have to add that he has a tendency to implausibly undress his female characters which could not be everyone's cup of tea, albeit it really never feels to be there for the sake of untasteful satisfaction.

Black humor and his uncanny sense for slapstick comedy synchronize well with this labyrinthian plot thus ... never make it too strenuous for the brain. I mean, there's a dictator rabbit who commands an army of witches, ey?

Netsutai no Citron is definitely pretentious, but it also isn't that bad.

The underlying themes this manga establishes are very controversial, the concept of freedom being one of them. Compared to works like one piece and AOT, both series had more time to explain said theme and work with it along the story, though I do believe netsutai no citron does it better than One piece, the amount of contradictions this manga has is crazy. This manga does in fact happen in a dystopia-like setting, and it does a good job in showing the downsides of a dystopian society.

Another downside I experienced while reading this manga ... is its use of intercourse, the mangaka really does use it a lot throughout the story. Although I was ready to see a lot of it, a lot of the sex scenes brought up in this manga can be deemed unnecessary especially because some of the scenes have some relevance to the storyline. I am definitely not trying to say all the scenes were meaningless, because some did show the axiom of addiction to sex, one of the main characters problems, but it also undermines the value of intercourse and I definitely cringed while it did. While art doesn't bother me, if you're an art enthusiast you will dislike this manga.

Overall, it isn't a bad read, but you come out with more questions than answers, and in some cases it might be good, in this case, it is definitely not great.