"My Sassy Girl", vol 4

[fiefoe]

By Ho Sik Kim / Dae Hong Min.

The opening chapter put me off quite a bit -- it seems that I have a problem with scatological humor when it's too visual.

Then the girl comes out and brightens things right up. I don't know why the translator pussyfoots about, but "sassy" is too insipid a word for her. Instead, one should imagine the soul of a steamroller in the body of a cream-puff. ('If I don't hit you at least once a day, my whole body feels weird.'). The boy is pretty much a doormat, but he does come up with lines like 'It seems that making fun of me was her favorite thing to do. I wonder if she knows that I'm happiest when she looks like she's having fun'.

The best panel is part of a fantasy sequence, in which the poor boy finds out that in the past life, he was the pet masseur of an Amazon queen, (guess who?) and his punishment for running away was to lend his service to a motley crew of dinosaurs in the queen's guard unit. In the other clever bit, the boy is given the task of arranging quadruple blind dates for her friends, who turned out to be hulking ex-military men.

The running gag seems to be the random ads placed in the background: 'Egg panties - Panties within panties'; a bald head with a full mouth of teeth menacingly advising subway passengers - 'Dandruff medicine, try it.'

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In the list of chapters of "Hikaru no Go", there's one titled "The Room of Profound Darkness". ‘幽玄’是也.