From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Miki is a renowned Japanese cartoonist and writer who specializes in the kind of scratch-your-head-and-laugh humor popularized in comics like
Nancy and
The Far Side. His unnamed protagonist is a squat little bookstore clerk of blank expression and deadpan movements. Each adventure occurs in just nine well-paced panels on a single page. The strips always begin with a simple premise: the man walking, fishing, talking or looking, and then, around panel six or seven, a surreal twist takes shape, revealing itself in the very last panel for maximum effect. Each development is wonderfully hallucinatory and inventive—never monotonous or predictable. Miki's patient, steady storytelling is well suited to his quirky artwork, which looks a little like manga around the eyes, but thereafter departs into his own seductively simple-looking cartoon language. With minimal tools, Miki portrays all sorts of expressions and atmospheres in his vignettes. Characters' limbs elongate, deform and are cut off—others turn into objects, and still others are monstrous looking. Miki treats them all the same, his poker-faced humor evident in every line.
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Wordless comics come no more demanding than the nine-panel creations of Miki, a media and literary critic, prolific translator from English, and anime scripter as well as cartoonist.
Anywhere but Here samples Miki's regular feature of the same name that has run in a Japanese analogue of
TV Guide since 1988. The central character in every installment--a short, round-headed fellow with a bowl-shaped haircut, half-moon eyes, and a mouth drawn in only when it can be expressive--is ostensibly Miki. Other people and animals participate, as needed. The American cartoon Miki's most resembles is the Sunday episodes of Irving Phillips'
Strange World of Mr. Mum, which far more often than Carl Anderson's famous
Henry ventured into the kind of get-it-or-don't situations that Miki characteristically conjures. Some of the sight gags are fairly straightforward: our man photographs a Loch Ness-style monster and later sees a man, woman, and child whose hairdos recapitulate the sea beast's head, spinal fins, and tail. Others are stranger and less explicable. All amuse, even if, finally, you don't get them.
Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
