What this genre is
Senshya Yoshida's Utsurun Desu took the four-panel structure apart. It made the word surreal stick in Japanese and came to stand for the subculture sensibility of the 1990s.
Gag & Comedy — about this band: The lineage of laughter Akatsuka Fujio systematised — nonsense, absurdism, and the slice-of-life that followed.
Connections
Three kinds of line: direct evolution, influence, and born in reaction against.
↓ Flowed into this
↑ Grew out of this
Key works
Gentle, philosophical four-panel strips about the otter child Bonobono and his friends in the forest. A long-running work where comfort and absurdity live together.
Absurd laughter with no thread of logic. The book that drove the absurdist gag boom of the 1990s.
Masaru and his cheerful club devote themselves to a mysterious martial art, Sexy Commando. Its surreal timing, cutting every thread of logic, was a gag revolution in 1990s Jump.
A slack-limbed gag manga about being dragged around by Jaguar, a man who has given his life to the recorder. Ten years of run on the slow-burning wrongness of its dialogue — Usuta's gag form perfected.
Gag & Comedy — walk the band
Genres in the same band, in order of year. You are at the highlighted one.
- 1962 Akatsuka Gag↓
- 1970 Nonsense & Parody↓
- 1980 Yonkoma↓
- 1988 Absurdist Gag（you are here）↓
- 2002 Slice-of-Life Yonkoma
All genres
About this entry
Genre boundaries are drawn where the network of manga happens to concentrate, not by decree. Years are approximate. Where opinions differ, this page says so rather than picking a winner.