Review: TUXEDO GIN

One of the nice things about Old School Manga Month is that it's a good opportunity to bring forgotten favorites and hidden gems back to light.  Today's review is a prime example of both, a series I remember reading and liking even before I began this blog but was seldom mentioned by anyone then and all but forgotten now.

TUXEDO GIN (Takishido Gin), by Tokihiko Matsuura.  First published in 1997 and first published in North America in 2003.

PLOT:

When Ginji Kusanagi saw Minako Sasebo, it was love at first sight.  He certainly didn't expect a girl like her to accept a date from a rough-looking kid on the verge of his pro boxing debut like him, but a motorcycle accident kills Ginji the day before that date can take place.  An angel gives him a second chance, but in order to get his body and his life back Ginji must live out a second life as a penguin.

Things don't get easier for the newly dubbed "Gin" as a penguin.  No sooner does he manage to escape his aquarium home than he has to deal with the goons who caused his killer accident, Minako getting kidnapped, and a rich rival who's determined to make Minako his.

STORY:

Tuxedo Gin has a lot of the qualities I tend to enjoy in shonen rom-coms: a high concept with a goofy tone, a tough guy made humble by the ridiculousness of their circumstances, and a reliance on slapstick over fanservice for humor.  All of this is topped off by the best gag of them all: having all of this revolve around a penguin (albeit one with the mind of a teen boy and a mean uppercut).  It's hard to ask for much more than that.

OK, there are maybe a few things I could ask for.  The circumstances that lead to Ginji becoming Gin are a little more convoluted than they really need to be.  I also think that Matsuura gives up a little too song on Gin interacting with the other penguins he's raised with.  No sooner is Gin born than there's a time skip to Gin's escape.  I understand that the mangaka wanted to get Gin back to Minako and the story at large, but there's so much comic potential with the non-reincarnated penguins that goes largely unused.  If nothing else, I would have loved to have seen more of Mike, Gin's feather-brained lackey.  He was fun.

I also wish that Minako herself was more of a character.  It's not that she doesn't get a lot of screentime.  She's quite present in the second half, since she's the one who adopts Gin and cares for him at her father's restaurant.  It's more that she's defined more by her faithfulness to Ginji than anything else.  She's a nice enough girl, but she's not given any opportunity to develop as a character beyond the dream girl Ginji met at the start.  If anything, she's more of a plot device than anything else, an object that Gin has to either retrieve from other men or protect from other men.  As much fun as I had reading this, it would have been even better if Minako actively got up to as much nonsense as the rest of the cast around her.

ART:

Tokihiko Matsuura got his start as an assistant to Tatsuya Egawa, and you can clearly tell from the way he draws his characters.  Minako is the most obvious example of this: her long, leggy proportions, the angles of her face, her tall, poofy hair, all of it wouldn't look out of place in something like Golden Boy.  Even the tasteful bits of fanservice of her in the bath are in line with his work.  She certainly stands in contrast to the rest of the human cast, who are all varying degrees of harsh, angular punks and fighters.

Then of course there is Gin and his fellow penguins.  Gin's look is closer to the stylized Suntory penguins than the adelie penguin he's meant to be, but I'll be damned if it isn't both adorable and versatile.  From his simple, plush form Matsuura is able to get a lot of wild and comic takes.  More than once he plays the cuteness of Gin's current form against the ferocity of his fighting spirit and as a gag it's effective every time.  The reasoning behind it may be convoluted, but Gin is absolutely what makes this manga work visually and comedically.

RATING:

Tuxedo Gin might be a gimmicky shonen romance, but its art has aged better than most of its peers and it makes the most of its adorable, implausible gimmick.  This is a series that deserves to be rediscovered.

This manga was published by Viz.  This series is complete in Japan with 15 volumes available.  All 15 were published; the physical volumes are out of print but all volumes are available digitally.