Mission-chan no Daibouken

This is a fairly short little comic about a girl's time in the afterlife after death, who partakes in 'missions' from her overseer in the afterlife in order to receive various rewards.

Readability-wise, I'd say this is a fairly confusing yet short experience, as combined with a general vagueness and mystery, there are frequent panel and page jumps between which I believe makes it easy to lose track of what is meant to be happening with the plot. The character motivations are never clearly pictured, and it's hard to tell what exactly the whole point of everyone being here is or how they got to this supposed 'afterlife'. The dialogue is fairly stilted and unnatural, coming across quite mechanical when combined with the cold overarching tone, and so it is hard to feel any emotional connection to the characters or their situation. I think one of the only times I felt particularly connected or moved emotionally to a degree was during chapter 4,

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where after looking forward to enjoying the exhibition, Mission-chan is in the end let down and disappointed by how boring it actually is.

Despite this though, I was still confused as to why she was suddenly excited in this particular chapter, after never showing any other emotion previously, so it just ended up feeling like a bit of a break in her character. In the same chapter she says how she must hold on to her joy, which I can't comprehend because she doesn't seem to have joy, as she hated her life and then decided to end her life, and then thought of it repeatedly up until this chapter, so why is she suddenly joyful? It's very hard to understand the character or what they actually want because of all these contradictions.

Adding on to the previous discussion of the confusing characterisations throughout, I feel as if the world-building is also particularly confused - it was stated this is the afterlife, but there are a bunch of other people here as well who kill animals and can be hurt or killed. I'm not sure if this was just the image of the afterlife they were portraying, or if during the writing they forgot it was the afterlife and just continued writing as if Mission-chan had simply just been kidnapped and taken somewhere. During the final mission,

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Mission-chan is tasked with bombing a school, killing the children inside

- this is never explained or elaborated on, it's simply just a job she has to undertake, but it raises the question of if these people do die multiple times throughout this afterlife? I think this set-up could've worked fine if it was just a little bit more fine-tuned and executed a little bit more clearly.

The art is not impressive in terms of new age modern manga standards, but I do find the style used particularly endearing for this type of short comic - with crudely drawn characters with little in terms of clean line work, embracing a very hectic and loose feeling to the whole story. There are sections with more realistic art, or even portions of newspaper clippings in a type of collage, but I genuinely enjoy the uneasy feeling from the chapter title pages. I think this sort of style is actually quite effective in stories with such a vague-ness and mystery to them, even if it is not the most technically advanced art that there is.

All in all, the plot, world, and characters, are all particularly surface level and not much is given to these areas in terms of development. To me, it comes across more as a way for the author to simply express how they feel about the world and their nihilistic observations, rather than a telling of a story, or a way of showcasing their characters in their world (honestly it probably seems similar to a vent work). As for what I actually took away from this, it made me think how really anyone can make something for others to experience if they truly want to and I admire the author for doing such, although I think they would have benefitted from putting some more thought into the direction that they wished to take the story, rather than simply what ideas they would like to bring up through it.