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. (Apr.)
