___OYASUMI PUNPUN
BY ASANO INIO___
~~~

Asano Inio is a renowned author for his dramatic and psychological works, and Oyasumi Punpun is a perfect example of what his style is. Despite its starting, unappealing first quick look, Oyasumi Punpun shows of that, often, assumptions based on single images and covers can be quite misleading.

Many other works that have has their main focus a dramatic story-telling try to make the reader empathize with the main characters by usually making them “pitiably likable”, but Oyasumi Punpun throws that trope out of the windows by doing exact opposite.

It all starts with a black humorish style of writing narrating the elementary schools years of the protagonist, Punpun Puniyama, following his life up to his maturity. The story is narrated by empathizing the psychological aspect of its characters, showing Punpun, and his family as tall birds wearing a white cape, this is done for letting us see emotions not usually describable with normal drawing and for not let us impersonate as Punpun. We, the readers , are an outside element in reading the story, that is so more accentuated by the fact that Punpun actions and dialogues are narrated in third person. But is important to remember that each those “birds” are actually normal persons in the eyes of other characters.

The life of Punpun take a drastic change when, a new girl named Aiko Tanaka, comes in his class and the young boy experience his first crush. Guided by his love and his coming puberty Punpun approaches Aiko and the two become friends, but soon Punpun finds that Aiko is a rather strange and mature girl, showing things that make him realize his “life objective”, a quite new point of view in life in respect of what his friends of the “Porn search club” had ever shown him before. The elementary school years are only the first arc of the manga, but they are also the foundation of all the characters and what is to come.
The characters themselves are the most developed part of the story, each and everyone of them goes through several changes during the course of their lives, and they all feel “real”. With that “real” approach to the character they ends to be, for the most part, relatively simple, not as complicated as other characters in similar works, but thanks to that the characters in Oyasumi Punpun feels pretty solid, and the author manages to actually make very hard for the reader to feel any empathy towards them.
The most well developed character is of course the protagonist, Punpun. He goes
through his life experiencing a number of dramatic problems, each of them represented with a different aesthetic design for his physical body, which is only show to us, the readers. Like I said before, we, are the only one that sees the strange representation of Punpun’s body, the people he meets sees only a normal person.
Another very important part in Punpun’s development is constituted by the other characters he meets, especially women, they all play an important part in putting together the story, with the influence that they have both on Punpun and on themselves.
For the artistic side of the work, Oyasumi Punpun does an amazing job. The art style in the beginning can throw off some people, but once the first impact is braced the drawing shows an amazing artistic side, well representing each character with their own uniqueness and well detailed persona, showing a rather mature and realistic style.
The realistic design of the characters is well accompanied by very beautiful backgrounds, all with a variegated and rock solid style, that well fits the dramatics of each and every situations that they are used for.

Oyasumi Punpun started as a black sheep for me, I don’t like its genre, and the art style really put me off in the beginning, but once I started reading I simply could not stop. The art style quickly grow up on me, and seeking out the development of each and every character glued me on the manga.
When a title can be liked that much by somebody that usually doesn't like its genre is a testimony of its quality, putting Oyasumi Punpun in my list of absolute classics.