Review: NOODLE FIGHTER MIKI

Food manga and comedy should be a fine combination in theory, but this manga manages to turn it into an incredibly off-putting combo.

NOODLE FIGHTER MIKI (Muteki Kanban Musume), by Jun Sadagawa.  First published in 2002 and first published in North America in 2005.

PLOT:

Miki Onimaru wants to help her mother with the family ramen shop, but everytime she sets out to do a chore or make a delivery she gets distracted.  Sometimes it's something mundane like a loose bird's nest, cleaning the street outside the shop, or a gaggle of kids taking over her old treehouse.  Sometimes it's something more complex like investigating a potential break-in or getting caught up in old rivalries.  The only thing stronger than Miki's lack of focus is her hot temper, often with unintentionally destructive results.

STORY:

I knew I was in for a bad time when partway through Noodle Fighter Miki I found myself having flashbacks to Aho Girl.  Both have heroines are both vain, oblivious, and easily distracted.  Both of them don't so much have a plot as they do a collection of sketches.  Both of them are painfully unfunny.

The biggest difference in the two (aside from the obvious restaurant angle) is in tone.  Where Aho Girl was mean-spirited, Noodle Fighter Miki is manic and hot-blooded.  Everyone in this series is mugging and shouting as much and often as possible and that's often well before Miki starts picking some very dumb fights.  This is all meant to enhance the ridiculous nature of the comedy, but in practice it just makes the whole series far more grating to read.  Each chapter becomes an endurance trial, ending only when Miki's mother pounds her into the ground, and a comedy should never feel like a trial.

ART:

This series dates from that awkward transitional period in anime and manga, as the more angular designs of the late 1990s gave way to the squishy, rounded ones typical of the 2000s.  Sadogawa tries to meet these styles in the middle, and the results are not great.  He ends up with this weirdly oversimplified faces (with weirdly wide-set eyes) on these mildly squat bodies, but he gives them the sort of darker, more detailed linework you would expect to see on designs from the 90s.  

Maybe that's part of the reason that he spends so much of the manga having everyone making the most extreme reactions, playing them up for intensity or to emphasize the so-called 'comedy.'  If anything, he overplays this, and in combination with all the forced wackiness and constant shouting this only adds to the story's more aggravating qualities.  It's telling that this manga is at its best when the characters shut up for once and engage in a little physical comedy, like that in the omakes.

RATING:

Noodle Fighter Miki is an artifact of a time when comedy was loud and obnoxious, art styles were in awkward flux, and bad manga like this could come and go without notice by American audiences.  This is nothing more than another footnote of a title from a publisher that itself was little more than a footnote.

This series was published by ADV Manga.  This series is complete in Japan with 17 volumes available.  3 volumes were published and are currently out of print.