Black Joke review

cheropteran10
Apr 05, 2021
In short, it's like Black Lagoon, but more gratuitous in terms of violence and sexuality. It's also notably worse in just about every way other than art, which is up to personal taste (I'll get into that later).

It's very edgy, following a set of immoral, unsavory characters on their short, episodic adventures of hyper violence. I'm four volumes in, and there has been almost no real continuity from one short arc (up to 3 chapters each) to the next, with the only carryover being one character's developing attraction to another. Just about every arc is just them getting in some predicament with various organized criminal groups that you'll never see again, and killing them. The main characters are all superpowered and you never really feel that they're in any danger. I also found them rather unlikeable. There's also this running "gag" where they attempt top subvert your expectations by setting up a showdown with a big bad at the end of an arc, only to have said big bad be defeated in a single panel. Gets real tired real fast. Writing: shallow and disposable, just like the random goons in the manga.

The way characters are drawn is very stylized and with extremely exaggerated proportions at times (like characters hands hanging below their knees). The continuity of character art is also poor, with characters seemingly going from 6.5 to 9 feet tall from one panel to the next. The objective quality such as linework and shading is good, and the backgrounds are consistently nice.

If this sounds somewhat interesting, check out a couple of chapters. Pretty much nothing changes and it doesn't get any better as it goes on, so you'll figure out pretty quickly whether or not it's for you.
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Black Joke
Black Joke
Auteur Taguchi, Masayuki
Artiste