Forum - View topicJason Thompson's House of 1000 Manga - Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei
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lys
 Posts: 1008 Location: mitten-state |
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I too hit a point where the pattern of the manga started to get "old"... but I was away from home and had several volumes on hand, so I kept reading anyway. And then I got hooked on the repetition of gags and predictability of format, and couldn't get enough! I also find it highly satisfying to play "spot the [penguin/dog/Matoi/that face/that other face/etc]" in every chapter. It's like an ongoing hidden-picture game :D
I'm sad Kodansha seems to have given up on the series, but the density of word and art and the episodic nature of each chapter make it easy to pick up a random volume to reread, and still feel like I'm discovering new things (that I may or may not have noticed and forgotten the first time). And the art is really fantastic! |
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Levitz9
 Posts: 1022 Location: Puerto Rico |
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So, are we doing the "Shazam"-thing where we think the protagonist's name is in the title?
This is me being nitpicky, and Jason was the translator for the manga, so he knows more than I do, but I thought the protagonist was named Nozomu Itoshiki? The joke was, his name wouldn't spell "zetsubou" unless it was written in kanji.[/spoiler] |
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roxybudgy
Posts: 129 Location: Western Australia |
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It's not that his name would be read as "zetsubou" when written in kanji. In kanji, the name is made up of three kanji characters: "ito", "shiki" and "nozomu". Kanji, or Chinese characters, are sometimes made up of parts. For example, a character in my own name is made up of the parts "jewel" and "forest", which combined together as one character means "jade". Or to put it in Japanese terms, my name would be read as "rin", but the two parts that make up "rin" would be "tama" and "hayashi". The joke is based on the fact that if you combine the kanji "ito" and "shiki" into one kanji, it looks like the kanji for "zetsu", and when "nozomu" is combined with another kanji to form a compound word, it is read as "bou", hence "zetsubou" and the rest of his family's names are based on the same joke, eg: "zetsumei", "zetsurin" etc... Think of it like writing "Icing" in English, but you write the "I" and the "c" so close to each other that the word now looks like "King". |
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Levitz9
Posts: 1022 Location: Puerto Rico |
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What he said. I'm a total dunce when it comes to the Japanese alphabet(s). |
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victor viper
 Posts: 630 Location: The deep south |
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For me, the magic number was 10 volumes. At that point, I just realized how formulaic it was getting. It was if I just said to myself "okay, pretty soon there's going to be some quirky thing over which Itoshiki-sensei will despair, and some laundry list of ways it manifests will follow". It's too bad, since the first couple of volumes were quite funny and edgy. Plus, the fact that MB couldn't get the anime released sort of dampened my enthusiasm for the series. |
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