Review: BOBOBO-BO BO-BOBO

The 2000s produced a lot of Weekly Shonen Jump's bigger (and longer) hits, but for every hit there were duds like this.

BOBO-BO BO-BOBOBO, by Yoshio Sawai.  First published in 2001 and first published in North America in 2005.

PLOT:

Six insidious Cyber Knights threaten to destroy all the practitioners of the mystical Fist of the Nose Hair technique.  Only one remains: Bobo-bo Bo-Bobobo.  Together with his extremely strange allies and Beauty on the sidelines, they will fight for their freedom in the biggest, silliest fights ever.

STORY:

I'm kind of glad I covered something like Dr. Slump before talking about this series.  That helps make it clear that I don't object to gag series, particularly those from Weekly Shonen Jump.  I just object to this one.

In fairness, Viz didn't make the best case for this series.  This techinically isn't the first Japanese volume, but instead chapters taken from the 9th and 10th volume in the series.  The only excuse Viz ever gave was that it was due to quality issues, and unlike Oh! My Goddess it doesn't seem that this was done to get viewers of the (then fairly recent) anime up to speed.  That means what little context there ever was for these characters and the conflict that moves them forward does not exist in this version.  That only aggravates this volume's biggest problem: its randomness.

Not a single panel can pass in this series without some sort of a joke.  Maybe it's a pop-culture reference, maybe it's a pun, maybe it's slapstick, maybe it's just doing something totally random while Beauty screams about how random their action is, but something is always happening.  The problem is that this rapid-fire delivery actually hurts the comedy.  Without any sort of break or build-up, there's never any space for the jokes to sink in or for the reader to laugh at any given gag, much less think about why any of it is happening.  I certainly don't envy the translation and adaptors for this series, who must have had to twist their brains into knots to make a lot of this coherent, much less comical.  It's just a shame it was done in service for a series that comes off as nothing but fatuous nonsense.

ART:

The randomness of Bobobo-Bo Bo-bobo extends to the art as well.  You've got the title character with his vaguely Fist of the North Star-inspired look, but then you have more crudely rendered characters like Beauty and weird, anthropomorphic creatures such as Poppa Rocks and Jelly Jiggler.  Of course, they all tend to shrink, grow, and shift to serve whatever joke needs to be delivered.  At least that's better than Beauty, who is mostly reduced to a bug-eyed, slack-jawed face poking out from the side of a panel.  

I wish I could praise the action, but it's honestly kind of stiffly drawn.  After all, it's all in service to comedy.  That's the same reason that the panels tend to be so small and backgrounds are all but unheard of.  With this series, everything is in service to cramming as many jokes on the page as possible.

RATING:

If you must consume Bobobo-Bo Bo-Bobo, stick to the anime.  The humor is so frantic and random in the manga that it verges upon obnoxiousness and Viz's attempts at condensing only made things worse.  I'm not surprised that it bombed upon initial release, but if the rest of the series is like this I honestly doubt it ever would have done well.

This series was published by Viz.  This series is complete in Japan with 21 volumes available.  5 volumes were published; the physical volumes are out of print, but all are available digitally through Viz's website.