Very funny
Beautiful designs
ultra original
A humor far below the belt that could put off
Because fighting spirits and aliens is not reserved only for Westerners, today I let you take a look at the latest shonen sensation that lands in France with Yokai force and even extraterrestrials!
The summary
Dandadan it’s the unlikely encounter between momoa popular and pretty young girl from a line of mediums and fascinated by ghosts, who has just come out of a love disappointment that is brutal to say the least, and Ken (quickly nicknamed Okarun by momo) young lonely otaku fascinated by UFOs. They challenge themselves to prove to each other that their passions are based on nothing and challenge themselves to enter places frequented by extra-terrestrials to momo and by a ghost for Ken. Of course, that’s where the trouble starts…
Our opinion
To paraphrase a quote attributed to the philosopher Kilian Mbappe “The Shonen, it has changed”. Indeed, being a child from the heyday of the arrival of Japanese anime from shonen, then a parent of children fed on manga for teens, I have seen the emergence in recent years of shonen “more”, c that is to say, rather intended for older teenagers, the fault of more extreme, rawer violence or more “adult” themes. Take for example the success of “The attack of the Titans”, “Promised Neverland”, “Demon Slayer” or even “One-Punch Man” between two flames Saitama.
And Dandadan is no exception. Not by its violence, rather moderate, but by its humor below the belt and the sexualized side of the representation of momo. In short, all this to say that the youngest of the family should rather stay on “My Hero Academia”…
Sold (and I hoped not oversold), for a few months, by a few readers ahead of the calendar in our latitudes (let’s say they all read Japanese, huh!) as the new shonen sensation, and widely forward by its publisher (Crunchyrollex Kaze) to the JapanExpo, I must say that at the time of putting my hands on it, mixed in me the hope of reading the announced slaughter and the fear of disappointment.
And I must say that the first pages rather disconcerted me… Indeed the very raw language and the ultra sexualization of momo really bothered me… But all this passes as the reading progresses, defused by the humor, the action, the story that is set up and the series which finds its right tone, namely a gravelly humor, but which remains in the right proportions.
And very quickly this cocktail of humor below the belt, fantasy and action works, other characters mingle with the dance and we definitely have a great time, aware of having read something quite unique in the about and besides this fact we come out a little disturbed by this reading. But what did we read there?
Besides, the volumes have passed through the hands of three people (my two teenagers aged 15 and 17, boy and girl, and me), and the feeling is the same, we come out groggy from this experience.
“Ok, we understand the scenario is solid, but what about the drawings?” Be patient little beetle, I’m getting there. Because there we come across a large piece of the manga. Indeed, it is a small graphic bomb, and this, from the first pages! Whether in everyday life, during action scenes that are sometimes daunting in their scale, or almost super-deformed during humorous scenes. It’s beautiful, and the graphics unit works very well. Even the colorization of the few color illustrations is beautiful.
It has been praised to us, sometimes even too much, but the noise around this manga signed Yokinobu Tatsu is more than justified. It’s a unique mix of fantasy, action and humanity, all sprinkled with sexy and gritty humor, which sometimes might not work on some people. Let’s hope that the next volumes continue in the same vein and avoid the pitfall of dispersion. In any case here, it is adopted!