The Best of 2014: Comics

This is a category that usually gets scant treatment in my Best Of posts, but 2014 was a good year in comics. Largely, this is due to a friend turning me on to digital comics. I quickly got caught up with Batwoman (previous post), and began looking around for the best titles today--among them Neil Gaiman’s return to The Sandman, Gerard Way’s contribution to the Spider-Verse, and the best-selling reboot of Ms. Marvel.

But what grabbed me most this year was a manga series called Cherry from a lesser-known author named Eisaku Kubonouchi. Volumes of Cherry have decidedly girly covers, so I was embarrassed when purchasing my first volume, but the story dragged me in, so I had to go back for more.

 

Cherry is a romantic comedy about recent high school graduate Kaoru, who works at a convenient store in a rural community. Sick of his dull life and unsure about the future, he elopes to Tokyo with his childhood sweetheart Fuko, but no sooner do they arrive than they realize they have no money, no jobs and no place to stay. Sure, the plot setup is half-baked, but so are Kaoru and Fuko. As they learn to fend for themselves in the city, they learn about love, friendship and growing up.

I was first attracted to Kubonouchi’s work when I ran across his sketches on Twitter. His illustrations of young women are dazzling and capture the essence of the Japanese word kirei (綺麗). Kirei means “pretty,” but it carries a number of other connotations. Foremost among them is cleanliness, but kirei also suggests delicacy and elegance more strongly than its English counterpart. Kirei is everything Japanese culture has traditionally told girls they should be. We might complain about the negative effects of such norms, but girly girls are people too and Kubonouchi draws them stunningly.

The above front covers are decent examples of Kubonouchi’s sense of kirei, but I recommend checking out his Twitter feed. He regularly posts illustrations at various stages of development from rough sketch to full color, and many showcase his humorous and cartoonish side as well.

 

Toward the end of the series, the complications of adult life--money, jobs, time constraints, social ties--threaten to pull Kaoru and Fuko apart, but they realize all the hard work and stress isn’t worth anything if you lose the one you love. This is cliché, but isn’t it something we all struggle with? How often do we feel like all the stuff that is dominating our lives isn’t what’s really important?

For all that, Cherry is also comedy. Kaoru and Fuko elope riding a pig, make friends with quirky characters, tangle with yakuza stooges, and get into the most ridiculous situations. Kubonouchi keeps the laughs coming, and the humor combined with striking art and a touching love story made this manga the most enjoyable comic series I read this year.