吉田戦車

Born: 1963

Genre: Gag (ギャグ), Comedy (笑い）

Language complexity: Light to medium. Sensha relies heavily on images to move the plot of his story.

By blind luck, Yoshida Sensha’s classic manga The Steel Man (鋼の人) was one of the first manga that I purchased upon arriving in Japan. The first story in the collection is about a middle school girl who shoots her foster father (who happens to be a whale) with a harpoon gun.

Sensha writes comedy manga, usually in the format of four panel strips or short pieces. He’s famous for a style of comedy in which you can’t logically explain to someone why it’s funny. Here’s a translation I did from うつるんです (1990). It should be read right to left.

Yoshida Sensha

Indeed some of his strips don’t seem funny to me at all. I sometimes think of him as reversing the normal writer-reader relationship. Sensha isn’t trying to make me laugh, I’m trying to understand Sensha. Take the next strip for example.

Huh?

This strip is part of series about this female character and her secret devices. I find it more perplexing than funny. It’s like a workout for my brain trying to understand Sensha’s sense of humor.

Although he has a following in Japan, Sensha remains unknown in the US. The exception is an excellent manga blog named Same Hat. The blog, which apparently takes its name from a classic Sensha strip, does a great job of covering the obscure manga scene for American readers. They also have a huge archive of Yoshida Sensha scanlations.

And for those of you who read Japanese, Yoshida Sensha is astoundingly prolific on his twitter.

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