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#IReadsYou Review: SUNNY Volume 3

 

SUNNY, VOL. 3
VIZ MEDIA – @VIZMedia

CARTOONIST: Taiyo Matsumoto
TRANSLATION: Michael Arias
LETTERS: Deron Bennett
ISBN: 978-1-4215-5969-8; hardcover (April 2014); Rated “T” for “Teen”
215pp, B&W, $22.99 US, $26.99 CAN

Sunny is a Japanese slice of life manga series written and illustrated by Taiyo Matsumoto.  It was serialized in Shogakukan's seinen manga magazine, Monthly Ikki, from December 2010 to September 2014 and in Monthly Big Comic Spirits from January to July 2015.  VIZ Media published an English-language edition of the manga as a full-color, hardcover, graphic novel series under its VIZ Signature imprint from May 2013 to November 2016.  Sunny is set at the orphanage, Star Kids Home, where there is a car called “Sunny,” a place where the children find solace.

Sunny, Vol. 3 (Chapters 13 to 18) opens with a visit from Nishita, a former resident of Star Kids Home.  Now, an adult, he wants to apologize for a terrible incident he started years ago that brought harm to Granpa, who heads the orphanage.

Next, Megumu decides to attend a party with a group of friends from school who live with their parents.  Her Star Kids “siblings” are not crazy about that, and Megumu feels conflicted.  Also, a TV station news crew visits Star Kids Home, and two brothers recall a visit to see their sick mother.

THE LOWDOWN:  The Sunny manga reads like an honest account of children adapting to life away from their parents and in an orphanage.  I often find myself racing through shonen manga in order to keep up with the action.  I also find myself fighting the urge to jump ahead when I read Sunny.  It is a character drama that is vivid and alive, and creator Taiyo Matsumoto makes me chase his narrative, as if it were shonen.

Sunny is heartbreaking and poignant, but it is even more upbeat and positive.  Matsumoto depicts the children of Star Kids as being imaginative and open to new possibilities.  Some may want their lives before Star Kids to come back, but that does not mean they won’t make the best of their new lives.  It’s a lesson we could all learn.

I READS YOU REVIEW:  Fans of the manga of Taiyo Matsumoto will want Sunny.

A-
7.5 out of 10

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You and Revised:  Thursday, September 17, 2020


The text is copyright © 2020 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved. Contact this blog or site for syndication rights and fees.

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Afterschool Charisma: Doctor History X

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Bokurano: The Last Two Children

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I'll Give it My All... Tomorrow: The Final Chapter

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Review: SUNNY Volume 1

SUNNY, VOL. 1
VIZ MEDIA – @VIZMedia

CARTOONIST: Taiyo Matsumoto
TRANSLATION: Michael Arias
LETTERS: Deron Bennett
ISBN: 978-1-4215-3448-0; hardcover (May 2013); Rated “T” for Teen is recommended for ages 13 and up
224pp, B&W, $22.99 US, $26.99 CAN

Taiyo Matsumoto is a manga creator best known for his manga, Tekkonkinkreet, which was made into an animated film in 2006. VIZ Media’s English-language publication of Tekkonkinkreet won Matsumoto an Eisner Award. He also created the series the manga, GoGo Monster.

Matsumoto’s new series, Sunny, began publication in the Japanese manga magazines, IKKI, in February 2011. Sunny is set at Star Kids Home, an orphanage. There, a car called “Sunny” is a place where the children find solace.

Sunny, Vol. 1 (Chapters 1 to 6) introduces readers to Star Kids Home, a home for orphans and foster children. Another resident of this Japanese orphanage is the Sunny 1200, a dilapidated old Nissan car that sits abandoned in the orphanage’s garden. The children call the old car “Sunny,” and it is off-limits to adults. Sunny is something of a clubhouse for the kids, because it is the place where they can escape their everyday lives, daydream, think, hangout, and talk.

I’ll start my review with this recollection. Many years ago, I read a review/essay about the late comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes, in which the review’s author praised cartoonist Bill Watterson for creating a “real kid” in Calvin. The author did his praising of the strip by criticizing “the Cosby kids” of The Cosby Show (1984 to 1992), the long-running NBC situation comedy starring Bill Cosby.

The author of the review/essay said (not exact words) that the Cosby kids weren’t real because of the way they acted. Back then, I figured the author did not know many upper-middle class African-American families – if he knew any at all. Maybe, if Theo Huxtable busted a cap in an ass or impregnated his fine-ass sister, Denise, then, the Cosby kids would have seemed more “real” to the review/essay author.

I don’t how many people will see the fictional children that Taiyo Matsumoto created for Sunny as real. At least at this point in the series, he hasn’t given each character a grocery list of quirks, motivations, and conflicts to prove to people that he can create “well-developed” or real characters.

Matsumoto simply makes the children seem authentic by their actions. The children of Star Kids Home (a great name, by the way) are seekers of knowledge, explorers of the ways of the world, and investigators of what drives people to do what they do. Sunny is poignant, but it is not really about a happy/sad or good/bad dynamic. Instead, Matsumoto has created manga with a sense of wonder and curiosity about the way the world is.

So are the children in Sunny real or real-like? I don’t know, but I do know that Sunny is the real deal in great comics.

A

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux

Dorohedoro: Memory-Go-Round

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