Genre: Comedy
Publisher: Shodensha (JP), Vertical (US print) Crunchyroll (US digital)
Story/Artist: Moyoco Anno
Translated by: Satsuki Yamashita
Serialized in: Feel Young
Review copy provided by the publisher
Moyoco Anno isn’t terribly well-known in the US but despite that she’s actually had a number of series published here, albeit not all of them are currently in print. Ironically enough she’s primarily a josei writer and I keep reading her least josei-like works, like this one and her magical girl series Sugar Sugar Rune. This is a josei work but on some level comedy blurs demographic lines even more than other genres, if it makes you laugh who cares who it’s aimed at?
Unfortunately, I didn’t laugh that much while reading this manga so I don’t seem to have been quite the target audience for this manga (the second “listening to otaku music in the car” one did make me laugh at the end however). It’s an autobiographical story about Moyoco Anno and her marriage to Hideki Anno (of Neon Genesis Evangelion fame) and I was surprised how much of the story focused on just him. Very few gags are just about Moyoco herself (“Rompers” in the story) or her life unconnected to her husband (“Director”) but a large chunk of them focus solely on Hideki’s antics which I found a little repetitive. I read the entire volume but the chapters all seem to have blurred together and it feels as if I only read the same things over and over.The “oh no I’m becoming (more of) an otaku!” jokes also get stale a bit fast, a few were amusing but most of the time I was left wondering why they married and getting pulled that far out of the story isn’t a good sign.
If the story had been mostly “look at the couple things we do” gags I think I would have enjoyed the comic a little more or at least been less grumpy about it. This is a comic by a woman manga-ka about her own life, I don’t want hear about a nerdy guy’s life then, that story is everywhere! Admittedly this work was serialized from 2002 to 2004 so there were fewer otaku life stories then but the jokes must have been just as repetitive then. “Hideki wants to lose weight for his Kamen Rider belt!”, “He strikes weird poses all the time, Moyoco thinks it’s all really weird at first and then finds herself becoming more and more of an otaku as well!” It’s almost hard to believe just how big of a nerd he is but between this story and his cameo in Shirobako it seems to be a well-known fact.
Unlike a lot of comedy manga I read this one isn’t a four-panel style comic but it’s done in regular pages and chapters. As monotonous as I found it, it wasn’t the individual chapters that dragged but the work as a whole for me. I had also hoped for a slightly more wrapped up conclusion. I didn’t expect that there would be a big even to tie the story together but it seemed as if it suddenly ended without any warning at all. So in the end I’m still interested in some of Moyoco’s other works, since I’ve heard good things about nearly all of them, but was rather disappointed here. Before reading I had assumed that the title Insufficient Direction referred to how her relationship with Hideki went, that they were both scatter-brained and meandered around, not that it was a reference to his job title as direction and that he would be the even bigger character in this book than her.