Merry Month of Manga: KONOSUBA: GOD'S BLESSING ON THIS WONDERFUL WORLD

It's a miracle! A modern isekai manga that neither bored nor infuriated me!

KONOSUBA: GOD'S BLESSING ON THIS WONDERFUL WORLD (Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku o!), based on the light novel by Natsume Akatsuki and character designs by Kurone Mishima, with art by Masahito Watari.  First published in 2014 and first published in North America in 2016.

PLOT:

Kazuma Sato had the bad luck to get hit by a truck on one of the rare occasions he emerged from his room.  In the afterlife, the goddess Aqua offers to send him to a fantasy world straight out of his JRPG-addled dreams with any weapon he wishes.  He jokingly suggests that Aqua herself be his weapon.

Now Kazuma is saddled with nothing but the basic skills of an adventurer and a goddess who's good for nothing beyond the odd healing spell.  Together with a mage who can only cast an explosion spell and a knight who lives for humiliation and pain, they try to find the next big quest.

STORY:

I'm normally not one for comedy based around humiliation.  I always found The Office too awkward to bear, and I never even tried with shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm and It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia.  The thought of applying that style of comedy to your bog-standard isekai fantasy set-up sounds like a recipe for uncomfortable annoyance.  Yet after reading this, I can see how Konosuba makes it work.

Konosuba works not so much on the strength of its individual characters but instead on the strength of their group dynamic.  None of the main quartet are particularly unique.  Kazuma is a blank slate, Crimson is a klutz, and Darkness is a particularly tedious take on the token masochist.  Aqua probably fares the best of all of them, thanks to her combination of liveliness, vanity, and desperation.  Yet when they are together, their incompetence equals out.  It negates a lot of the power fantasy that makes so many modern isekai feel so tedious.

It also avoids eschews the typical hero's quest in favor of having everyone fart around doing menial jobs and side quests.  Since the stakes aren't serious, the stories are allowed to be off-the-wall and outright goofy at times.  They can be killing zombies one moment and end up harvesting magical flying cabbages the next.  This narrative flexibility reminds me a lot of Gintama (minus that series's reliance on pop culture references), and that's possibly the best compliment I can give this series.

ART:

Watari's art hews pretty closely to Mishima's original art for the light novels, although Watari's is noticeably cuter and rounder.  That being said, both are pretty nondescript, with very plain faces and costumes that fit with the sort of nonsensical clothes typically seen in modern anime fantasy series.  Watari's paneling flows nicely and doesn't do a disservice to the jokes, but I do wish he had lightened up on the fanservice.  It's not constant, but it comes up frequently enough to throw the reader off.

RATING: 

In spite of its lackluster art, Konosuba manages to work as a comedic riff on modern isekai stories.  It's a bunch of losers bouncing off of one another in legitimately entertaining ways, and as such it's one of the few I could legitimately recommend.

This series is published by Yen Press.  This series is ongoing in Japan with 13 volumes available.  11 volumes have been published and are currently in print.