Holiday Review: PENGUIN GENTLEMEN

Fanservice can take all sorts of shapes, though.  Often it's attached to round, bouncy girls, but sometimes it's indulging in a fantasy where penguins can become tall, strapping men who serve you drinks and penguin trivia.

PENGUIN GENTLEMEN (Penguin Shinshi), by Kishi Ueno.  First published in 2020 and first published in North America in 2021.

PLOT:

At a club somewhere that's not quite Japan there is a club staffed by a group of eccentric, handsome gentlemen.  No one would suspect that these same men are in fact actual penguins who deliver lots of facts about their respective species and habits along with their trays of champagne.

STORY:

If I had to sum up Penguin Gentlemen in a single word, it would be "inane."

Despite the silliness of the premise and a structure that vaguely resembles 4-koma, there aren't really any jokes to be found here.  There's not much in the way of character either, as each penguin is assigned a very basic personality based on their species.  No one dares explain how these penguins are able to make themselves appear as humans, much less how they all ended up in a nightclub in some alternate world version of Japan.  Mostly it just exists to deliver penguin trivia.

This apparently started out as a webcomic on pixiv.  Now, I realize that the internet can support all sorts of strange and niche webcomics, but even I have a hard time believing that there were enough people out there to make this popular enough to merit not only a print run but also international distribution.  I'd say that it's only fit for small children who might find the trivia legitimately novel, but the lack of humor would leave them bored.  I'd say it was meant as a way for horny women to have fun with anthromorphized water birds, but these characters are too one-note to be fun.  Who is this for?  Only Kishi Ueno, as far as I can tell.

ART:

I have to presume that the audience for this series were meant to find the penguins' human alter egos attractive, but frankly I don't see it.  I guess we're meant to be impressed with their fine suits and tall, strapping statures, but their harsh, stiff features combined with their blank, pale stares make them seem more ghoulish than anything else.  At least their true penguin selves are suitably adorable.

Visually there's not much more to say about this series.  Backgrounds are minimal.  Panels tend to stay tightly focused on the cast.  Half of its pages seem to be dedicated to diagrams showing off the actual features and behaviors of penguins.  Yet the publisher went out of its way to give it such a fancy presentation, with lots of color pages and a hardback cover with a slip.  It seems a waste to use such indulgences for such a trivial manga.

RATING:

Penguin Gentlemen is an absolute oddity that doesn't even have the good sense to be an interesting oddity.  You would get a lot more out of going on a Wikipedia deep dive on penguins than you would from reading this manga.

This book was published by Yen Press.  It is currently in print.

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