Mob Psycho 100
Jun. 14th, 2018 02:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksI feel like writing about something I really love.
Mob Psycho 100 is a completed fifteen-volume manga series by the webcomic artist ONE, which ran between 2012 and 2017. The first season of the anime adaptation aired in 2016. Both are instant classics which are easily among the highlights of comics and animation of the last decade.
ONE is more famous for his other series, One-Punch Man, which I do not like. It is a deconstruction of superhero fiction, which is simply not my genre, and while I admire its craft and spectacle, it's a bit cold and calculating for me to find enjoyable. Mob Psycho 100, however, is about psychic kids, which definitely is one of my genres. It's also a warm, intimate, human story which I think would be enjoyable whether you know about the tropes of psychic-kids fiction or not.
Shigeo "Mob" Kageyama is an ordinary kid in his second year of middle school, except for his unfathomably, ludicrously, immeasurably powerful psychic abilities, which include telekinesis, seeing ghosts, and pretty much anything else paranormal he tries. Frightened of his own capacity for violence should he lose control of his powers, Mob has basically shut off all his emotions. He is adept at blending into the background: he is academically average, he doesn't do sports, he doesn't really have friends, and he goes through his life just showing up. That's where he gets the nickname Mob, which is the Japanese term for the undistinguished extras in movie crowd scenes, the people there to fill the scene out.
However, emotional repression is not exactly sustainable as a long-term strategy, and every so often things get through Mob's barriers. There's literally a narrative gauge that shows to what percentage he is angry, frustrated, etc., and when his emotions hit one hundred percent, there's the potential for... explosions. Which is where the show gets its title.
Luckily, Mob has something of a support structure. His parents are just kind of there, but his little brother, Ritsu, although without psychic powers of his own, is intelligent, popular, athletic, talented, and genuinely concerned for Mob's well-being. Also, there's Mob's after-school boss at the Spirits and Such exorcism agency, the greatest psychic of the twenty-first century, the overwhelmingly powerful... okay, yeah, I can't get through that sentence, Mob's boss Reigen Arataka suspiciously resembles a completely non-psychic regular con artist. Reigen has a good suit, a bad office, a silver tongue, and an empty wallet.
Have I mentioned yet that this is a comedy?
And it's that rarest of things, a comedy that is in no way mean-spirited. The humor comes entirely from character and situation. The series has a large cast and I love them most of them dearly. Mob, Ritsu, and Reigen are three of the best characters I have encountered in a very long time, because they are genuinely three-dimensional, and both their flaws and their strong points are written with that shock of unexpectedness you get when someone you know well does something you didn't know they were capable of doing, but which nevertheless makes perfect sense once you think about it. Reigen is actually even sleazier than I have already made him sound, and I will legitimately go to bat for him and Mob as the best parental relationship in anime, period, end of sentence, no other contenders.* The plot is tightly woven in ways I did not see coming; the manga may be the best plot I've seen in manga in terms of pacing, shape, and element of surprise. The anime has not yet covered all of the manga, but it leaves off at a good stopping place, and a second season has been greenlit.
Flaws? Well, there's one major, obvious one, although in my opinion it doesn't necessarily count as a flaw at all, and it can even be said to have done very good things for the series.
You see, ONE can't draw.
I mean at all. I mean the man cannot render a figure. The reason that One-Punch Man and Mob Psycho 100 were initially webcomics is that no professional publisher would purchase visual art produced by someone who draws as badly as ONE does (before they were proven properties, that is). There's an effect that often happens in webcomics, where the sheer amount of practice the creator gets by meeting a regular posting schedule causes leaps and bounds in the skill of the art-- even the XKCD guy draws better stick figures than he used to. This did not happen to ONE. Thousands of pages of manga have failed both to teach him how to draw an elbow, and to convince me that he ever will learn how to draw one. He cannot do perspective and he cannot do foreshortening. I thought for a while towards the end of Mob Psycho that he was getting better, but then I found out he hired an assistant. I know real, live ten-year-olds who draw better than ONE does.
When One-Punch Man became a gigantic basically-printing-money-with-this-property hit, the publisher Shueisha, in desperation, hired the manga artist Yusuke Murata (Eyeshield 21) to redraw literally the entire series, one for one, panel by panel. It's the only time I've ever heard of a publisher doing anything of the kind. This has not happened for Mob Psycho 100.
And it doesn't need to, because ONE can't draw at all, but what he can do? Is make comics. They redrew One-Punch Man panel for panel because in terms of visual flow of the page, layout, choosing exactly what information to convey in each panel, blocking of action shots, control of the flow of time between panels, camera angle, and the thousand other little details that make the difference between a comic and a tangled mess, ONE is a straight-up genius. Even his character designs are carefully planned to take advantage of his, um, art style, because he knows exactly what he can do, and he maximizes it on every single page. You can parse many of his pages without needing the dialogue-- but you want it, because it's great.
So you may find Mob Psycho 100 ugly, and if you do, that's fair, and there are some people who can't put up with the visuals, which is also fair. What you will not find it is confusing, over-drawn, or poorly laid out, ever. Honestly, after a few volumes I began to find the art endearing.
Which is also the attitude Studio Bones took when they made the anime adaptation; they looked at it and said, what if exactly this, but with the best animation you have ever seen in your entire life? Seriously, if you are into the technical aspects of animation at all, you have probably already watched this show, but if not, run, don't walk. The opening sequence is in my list of top five or six anime openings of all time, the dreamy paint-on-glass of the ending sequence is jaw-dropping, and the show itself throws everything from CGI to oil pastels at you. It is the most adventurous TV animation I have yet encountered, and it does not look like any other anime out there.
Okay, I'm going to embed the opening, because I love it just that much:
Actual flaws: It takes a while for the series to develop good female characters, and there aren't as many of them as I'd like when they do start getting attention, to an extent where the anime mostly hasn't gotten to any of that yet. Also, the anime starts rather slowly-- I like the bit they start with now that I know the characters well, but I'm not sure it's the best introduction. Give it several episodes for the writing to kick in if it's not catching you.
Also, one reason I am writing this review now is that-- okay, so there's only so much Adaptation Luck to go around, right? Like, if a thing is good in one medium, and then it's good in another medium, after a while you just kind of start pushing it if you keep putting it into more and more media. I say this because Netflix just released a live-action adaptation, and it, by itself, is so hideously, karmically bad that it makes up for all the amazement of the manga and anime on its own and probably guarantees that season two will be godlike. I am not talking amusing-bad, I am talking they misunderstood the point of the series so direly that they don't deserve to share the title bad. I am talking bad like the time some misguided fools made a Film We Don't Talk About out of The Dark Is Rising. I am talking so far into Let Us Never Speak Of This Again territory that I legitimately hope everyone will forget this thing ever existed within a couple of years. It is a master-class in how to fuck up good writing and I recommend avoiding it like the plague it is. Maybe no one will watch it, and it can all just go away. I wanted to help make sure no one tripped and fell into it by mistake and wound up missing the good versions.
Oh and there's an OVA, but it's a recap of season one with a light frame story, so don't watch it unless you've already seen season one. I love the characters so much that I found it delightful even though less than ten percent of it is new footage, but there's no point unless that's where you are too.
The anime's on Crunchyroll and the manga's coming out from Dark Horse later this year. This was the show that got me back into watching anime after several years of having wandered off because of bad light-novel-based harem shows, and it's on my list of personal classics with things like Baccano! and Haibane Renmei.
Now at some point I need to manage to write about Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, and then I'll feel like I'm basically caught up to myself in anime reviewing.
* I once rewatched this series for parenting advice.
Mob Psycho 100 is a completed fifteen-volume manga series by the webcomic artist ONE, which ran between 2012 and 2017. The first season of the anime adaptation aired in 2016. Both are instant classics which are easily among the highlights of comics and animation of the last decade.
ONE is more famous for his other series, One-Punch Man, which I do not like. It is a deconstruction of superhero fiction, which is simply not my genre, and while I admire its craft and spectacle, it's a bit cold and calculating for me to find enjoyable. Mob Psycho 100, however, is about psychic kids, which definitely is one of my genres. It's also a warm, intimate, human story which I think would be enjoyable whether you know about the tropes of psychic-kids fiction or not.
Shigeo "Mob" Kageyama is an ordinary kid in his second year of middle school, except for his unfathomably, ludicrously, immeasurably powerful psychic abilities, which include telekinesis, seeing ghosts, and pretty much anything else paranormal he tries. Frightened of his own capacity for violence should he lose control of his powers, Mob has basically shut off all his emotions. He is adept at blending into the background: he is academically average, he doesn't do sports, he doesn't really have friends, and he goes through his life just showing up. That's where he gets the nickname Mob, which is the Japanese term for the undistinguished extras in movie crowd scenes, the people there to fill the scene out.
However, emotional repression is not exactly sustainable as a long-term strategy, and every so often things get through Mob's barriers. There's literally a narrative gauge that shows to what percentage he is angry, frustrated, etc., and when his emotions hit one hundred percent, there's the potential for... explosions. Which is where the show gets its title.
Luckily, Mob has something of a support structure. His parents are just kind of there, but his little brother, Ritsu, although without psychic powers of his own, is intelligent, popular, athletic, talented, and genuinely concerned for Mob's well-being. Also, there's Mob's after-school boss at the Spirits and Such exorcism agency, the greatest psychic of the twenty-first century, the overwhelmingly powerful... okay, yeah, I can't get through that sentence, Mob's boss Reigen Arataka suspiciously resembles a completely non-psychic regular con artist. Reigen has a good suit, a bad office, a silver tongue, and an empty wallet.
Have I mentioned yet that this is a comedy?
And it's that rarest of things, a comedy that is in no way mean-spirited. The humor comes entirely from character and situation. The series has a large cast and I love them most of them dearly. Mob, Ritsu, and Reigen are three of the best characters I have encountered in a very long time, because they are genuinely three-dimensional, and both their flaws and their strong points are written with that shock of unexpectedness you get when someone you know well does something you didn't know they were capable of doing, but which nevertheless makes perfect sense once you think about it. Reigen is actually even sleazier than I have already made him sound, and I will legitimately go to bat for him and Mob as the best parental relationship in anime, period, end of sentence, no other contenders.* The plot is tightly woven in ways I did not see coming; the manga may be the best plot I've seen in manga in terms of pacing, shape, and element of surprise. The anime has not yet covered all of the manga, but it leaves off at a good stopping place, and a second season has been greenlit.
Flaws? Well, there's one major, obvious one, although in my opinion it doesn't necessarily count as a flaw at all, and it can even be said to have done very good things for the series.
You see, ONE can't draw.
I mean at all. I mean the man cannot render a figure. The reason that One-Punch Man and Mob Psycho 100 were initially webcomics is that no professional publisher would purchase visual art produced by someone who draws as badly as ONE does (before they were proven properties, that is). There's an effect that often happens in webcomics, where the sheer amount of practice the creator gets by meeting a regular posting schedule causes leaps and bounds in the skill of the art-- even the XKCD guy draws better stick figures than he used to. This did not happen to ONE. Thousands of pages of manga have failed both to teach him how to draw an elbow, and to convince me that he ever will learn how to draw one. He cannot do perspective and he cannot do foreshortening. I thought for a while towards the end of Mob Psycho that he was getting better, but then I found out he hired an assistant. I know real, live ten-year-olds who draw better than ONE does.
When One-Punch Man became a gigantic basically-printing-money-with-this-property hit, the publisher Shueisha, in desperation, hired the manga artist Yusuke Murata (Eyeshield 21) to redraw literally the entire series, one for one, panel by panel. It's the only time I've ever heard of a publisher doing anything of the kind. This has not happened for Mob Psycho 100.
And it doesn't need to, because ONE can't draw at all, but what he can do? Is make comics. They redrew One-Punch Man panel for panel because in terms of visual flow of the page, layout, choosing exactly what information to convey in each panel, blocking of action shots, control of the flow of time between panels, camera angle, and the thousand other little details that make the difference between a comic and a tangled mess, ONE is a straight-up genius. Even his character designs are carefully planned to take advantage of his, um, art style, because he knows exactly what he can do, and he maximizes it on every single page. You can parse many of his pages without needing the dialogue-- but you want it, because it's great.
So you may find Mob Psycho 100 ugly, and if you do, that's fair, and there are some people who can't put up with the visuals, which is also fair. What you will not find it is confusing, over-drawn, or poorly laid out, ever. Honestly, after a few volumes I began to find the art endearing.
Which is also the attitude Studio Bones took when they made the anime adaptation; they looked at it and said, what if exactly this, but with the best animation you have ever seen in your entire life? Seriously, if you are into the technical aspects of animation at all, you have probably already watched this show, but if not, run, don't walk. The opening sequence is in my list of top five or six anime openings of all time, the dreamy paint-on-glass of the ending sequence is jaw-dropping, and the show itself throws everything from CGI to oil pastels at you. It is the most adventurous TV animation I have yet encountered, and it does not look like any other anime out there.
Okay, I'm going to embed the opening, because I love it just that much:
Actual flaws: It takes a while for the series to develop good female characters, and there aren't as many of them as I'd like when they do start getting attention, to an extent where the anime mostly hasn't gotten to any of that yet. Also, the anime starts rather slowly-- I like the bit they start with now that I know the characters well, but I'm not sure it's the best introduction. Give it several episodes for the writing to kick in if it's not catching you.
Also, one reason I am writing this review now is that-- okay, so there's only so much Adaptation Luck to go around, right? Like, if a thing is good in one medium, and then it's good in another medium, after a while you just kind of start pushing it if you keep putting it into more and more media. I say this because Netflix just released a live-action adaptation, and it, by itself, is so hideously, karmically bad that it makes up for all the amazement of the manga and anime on its own and probably guarantees that season two will be godlike. I am not talking amusing-bad, I am talking they misunderstood the point of the series so direly that they don't deserve to share the title bad. I am talking bad like the time some misguided fools made a Film We Don't Talk About out of The Dark Is Rising. I am talking so far into Let Us Never Speak Of This Again territory that I legitimately hope everyone will forget this thing ever existed within a couple of years. It is a master-class in how to fuck up good writing and I recommend avoiding it like the plague it is. Maybe no one will watch it, and it can all just go away. I wanted to help make sure no one tripped and fell into it by mistake and wound up missing the good versions.
Oh and there's an OVA, but it's a recap of season one with a light frame story, so don't watch it unless you've already seen season one. I love the characters so much that I found it delightful even though less than ten percent of it is new footage, but there's no point unless that's where you are too.
The anime's on Crunchyroll and the manga's coming out from Dark Horse later this year. This was the show that got me back into watching anime after several years of having wandered off because of bad light-novel-based harem shows, and it's on my list of personal classics with things like Baccano! and Haibane Renmei.
Now at some point I need to manage to write about Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, and then I'll feel like I'm basically caught up to myself in anime reviewing.
* I once rewatched this series for parenting advice.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-14 04:56 pm (UTC)Okay, will watch.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-14 09:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-14 10:36 pm (UTC)Now at some point I need to manage to write about Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, and then I'll feel like I'm basically caught up to myself in anime reviewing.
Huh, I hadn't known they'd adapted that. I never got around to reading it, but I had some friends who really enjoyed the manga.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-15 02:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-15 03:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2018-06-15 03:08 pm (UTC)The muscle club is my particular favorite (there is one really, really good joke involving them in the live action, to give it its due), honestly.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-15 10:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-16 07:43 am (UTC)(Related to terrible movies, did you know Andrew Lloyd Webber made a sequel to Phantom of the Opera? I found a DVD of it in a bargain bin, which is not the kind of bin it should have been in. It viewed much like Webber had been, for the last few decades, getting increasingly frustrated that everyone seemed to think the Phantom was the villain or something, and decided to write a sequel to show how actually Raoul was the bad guy who Christine could never be happy with, and the Phantom was just misunderstood and could finally vindicate himself and the world would finally understand how tragic Webb-- I mean the Phantom's life had been.)
no subject
Date: 2023-05-08 07:33 am (UTC)