Kiyohiko Azuma

Someone recently asked a group I'm in for anime recommendation. I replied, "If you haven't seen Azumanga Daioh, you haven't lived." The same applies to the manga, if not more so. Azumanga Daioh, or "AzuD" as my friend and I referred to it, is the story of a group of high school friends, told almost entirely in 4koma, or 4 panel comic strips. Many people's reactions to things like "manga about high school girls" would be a sigh, or a comment like "What super powers do they have?", but the show more girls of
Azumanga Daioh are different. They are completely normal. As someone who was once a high school girl, I find this is actually the closest anything comes to representing me and my friends. Azumanga Daioh is a comedy series, and there are jokes that still make me laugh every time, despite having read them 10 times. I feel like these girls are my friends as well, and Azumanga Daioh is just a great series all around. Even if you aren't into manga, I would still whole-heartedly recommend Azumanga Daioh to anyone. A funny, cute, light read, Azumanga Daioh is probably my favourite manga of all time. show less

Wow, very bizarre. This episodic manga is about a young girl - Yotsuba - moving to a new town with her Dad, and meeting the family of a mother and three daughters that lives next door. Somehow the endearingly obnoxious Yotsuba charms her neighbours more than she annoys, and miraculously has the same effect on this reader too. I'm not sure why this is so appealing - the stories are very episodic and really pretty slight with little true plot development over this volume. But the depiction of show more Yotsuba, with her confusion and capriciousness and curiosity is really entertaining and endearing.

I'm not giving it a rating as I wouldn't know whether to give it 2 stars for being so slight or 5 stars for being so well done. show less

Cute, but nowhere near as amusing as the first two or three volumes of this series. It's always sad when this happens.

Also, it seems like maybe this volume was put out by a different publisher than the others in the series that I've read so far, and that is not a good thing. Instead of straight translations, various sound effects and honorifics are left in Japanese and footnoted to death. I'm sure some fans are interested in that kind of accuracy, but I just find it irritating to be pulled show more out of story repeatedly for explanations, usually of things that are fairly obvious.

Yotsuba also made a number of cutesy speaking errors -- not vocabulary, but grammar -- the likes of which I had never seen before in this series and hope never to see again.

I'll read on, but with lowered expectations. show less

Ella has been giggling at these for over a year now, so I thought I'd give them a try. I mean, she (and her younger sister) were right about the Bone books: I *do* like them. Turns out that she's right about these too: they're sweet, charming and entertaining.

Yotsuba is 5 years old and she has green hair; she locks herself in the bathroom, goes hunting for cicadas (it's a catch-and-release program, never fear), hangs out with the neighbour girls, learns about doorbells and air conditioners show more and escalators. The humour comes from the discrepancy between the way that Yotsuba sees the world and the way it actually is, but the overall appeal is rooted in the fact that the relationships are believable and the reader wants to spend time in the company of these characters. show less