Oyasumi Punpun follows the titular Punpun, who starts the manga as a child and through several timeskips grow to adulthood. The series is focused on his dysfunctional family and friends and the situations he finds himself in. The twist is that not only does the manga have this sense of off-kilter awkwardness, the strangeness is further enhanced by Punpun himself, and his family, being depicted as small sketchy birdlike creatures although they interact with the world as normal humans.
The charm of Punpun isn’t really charm as such. Of course the artwork is amazing with exceptionally detailed backgrounds, beautiful and visually distinct character designs and an absurdist aesthetic that blends realist foundations with dreamlike and inky occult phenomena. The characters are devastatingly real, with each one being more flawed and intrinsically doomed than the last but still able to show their fragile humanity at times. The story is magical but banal, showing you the frustratingly believable misadventures of a spineless depressive with increasingly less understandable vignettes concerning an insane prophet’s attempts to retune the universe’s essential music. But this complete package is somehow extremely compelling despite how unknowable it can be.
Punpun isn’t a battle manga, its not a horror or thriller and its not quite a drama. I suppose it best fits the Coming-of-age genre, but the age that Punpun comes to isn’t really the heroic state that it is in other stories. He doesn’t really overcome life’s challenges but rather is run over by them over and over again, sometimes learning a lesson only to then have another belief or positive start destroyed. Punpun is in turns heartwarming and then brutally depressing. It’s a lot of fun just hanging out with the characters, but invariably they ask you to walk down this dark alley and you start to see things you wish you hadn’t.
Punpun is one of the best surreal manga, perfectly capturing that space in between real life and a strange other world. Its excessively dark, bitterly comic and searingly lovely. It’s a slow jam that might not go down well with fans of Big 3 style shonen or fuzzy romance type media, but for those willing to look into the abyss, this manga might be a diamond in the rough.
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