Books: BoBoBo-Bo Bo-BoBo Graphic Novel 1

The fact that Viz has chosen to “begin” the series several volumes along the line* doesn’t really make things hard to follow, since there is no plot worth speaking of in the first place. Instead of a story, Bo-bobo throws at us a fusillade of twisted take-offs on common manga tropes, like a parody of DragonBall Z as written by fifth-graders guzzling Red Bull during lunch period. The Bo-bobo of the title, a muscleman with prehensile body hair and a Pokémon-yellow ‘fro, roams the future world of the year “300×” taking out evildoers that are out to turn the world bald. Along the way he’s joined by a slew of sidekicks — the hyperactive Poppa Rocks, the enigmatic Softon (whose head either looks like a dog turd or a cone of ice cream depending on how you want to look at it), the protean Jelly Jiggler … and last but not least Beauty, the audience-identification character whose function is to stare bug-eyed at the action from a corner of the frame and look aghast.

I’ve got to give credit where it’s due: it takes a phenomenal amount of energy to consistently produce something this manic. Bo-bobo absolutely never slows down or comes up once for air. Doubletalk, puns, non-sequitur jokes, in-jokes, and blizzards of just plain all-around weirdness spew off the pages. At one point Bo-bobo and his buddies take part in a deathmatch while hanging on bungee cords over a bottomless pit; in another (immensely clever) adventure, they fight a bad guy named “The Poet” who uses kanji and katakana as his weapons. I’m reminded of a friend who created a character for a role-playing game. His power was that everywhere he went, he had a pair of black bars that followed him around like he was wearing them on a sandwich board. Whenever he talked, his dialogue appeared in those black margins as subtitles, which he could then pick up and use to bludgeon his opponents. He called it “Letterboxing.”

I would be lying if I said I didn’t laugh at the goings-on in Bo-bobo. I did, many times, but mostly at things that amounted to one-shots or throwaways. At one point Bo-bobo’s attacked by a karate-chopping guy in a bunny suit (no, seriously); Bo-bobo’s ‘fro pops open to reveal a lion, which nearly bites the rabbit’s head off. Bo-bobo’s line: “FIST OF THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST.” Beauty’s corner-of-the-panel wisecrack: “Mother Nature is a cruel mistress!” I also laughed loudly at moments that referenced everything from The Matrix to Jackie Chan’s Rumble in the Bronx, but the best-sustained sequence is one where Bo-bobo transforms into a magical girl (!) and discovers that she can manifest anything she want by simply singing about it.

It’s dizzying, and also more than a little wearying. In short doses, this sort of thing goes a long way — which is probably why the individual adventures worked okay in the context of Shonen Jump when they appeared there earlier this year. When jammed together into a single volume, though, they’re only for the die-hards.

*An earlier, unnumbered volume also pulled several adventures out from the middle of the series as a “taster”.

Art: Yoshio Sawai’s art is designed to be funny more than anything else, and so consequently Bo-bobo isn’t a very polished-looking title. Sometimes this crudeness is entirely deliberate — a title like this doesn’t need to look like Vagabond, anyway — but it also means the whole thing is that much less impressive. Sawai’s good sense of control over line thicknesses and clever eye for staging gags do pay off, but the amateurish look gets a bit wearying over the course of a whole volume.

Translation: I got wind of Bo-bobo long before it ever made it into English, and in fact have a couple of untranslated volumes from early in the series. One glance at it told me this was going to be a translator’s worst nightmare, especially if they planned to localize it for as broad an American audience as possible. To my surprise, they haven’t done a bad job, especially considering how tricky the source material was. For the most part, effects and signage had been retouched, with the exception of things where the characters themselves are of key importance — e.g., the whole kanji-fight with the Poet has been left as-is with in-the-margin annotations.

The Bottom Line: When people say that a given title has a “cult following”, that means one of two things: a) it’s a genuinely good item that deserves wider recognition, or b) it’s hard to get into it without having fellow fans around. Bo-bobo falls into category b) for me. If you somehow already got bitten by the bug — say, through the (admittedly hilarious) English-dubbed edition of the TV show — go snap this up and giggle yourself silly. Otherwise … pass the aspirin.