Yotsuba&! 1 (Yotsuba&)

Content note for adoption.

Looking at the mangaka, Kiyohiko Azuma he is apparently best known for his much shorter work Azumanga Daoih. Otherwise, I guess their main work is not publishing manga so publication of Yotsuba has been on the slower side. I certainly assumed that the series was long over, but apparently not. Comparing my local comic shop and goodreads it does appear as if all 15 volumes currently available are also translated; so that's nice. Currently my plan is to try and read these volumes by the end of the year and do another review once I've caught up? Because I've had bad experiences reading these sort of slice of life volumes one after another after another, but who knows when this series will be over. Knowing my luck, I'll do all this then Azuma will announce in 2024 that they are finishing up the series after one or two more volumes or something else that will render final series thoughts truncated and or awkward.

Keywords that came to mind with this first volume: family, new neighbourhood, naïve, learning, and failing.

As I've already mentioned a few times, I did try and pick this book up before and ended up putting it down pretty fast. Revisiting this series now, I initially thought it was because I was too serious at the time. And while I feel like that was probably a bit of it, now having read the whole first volume I also feel like it was related to how many times Yotsuba does the wrong thing. Which is an issue I've run into a couple of times with stories about young niave children. But instead of being an immediate DNF, I guess this time around I'm kind of intrigued by this discomfort with imperfection and would like to lean into it and figure out what's up. I kind of suspect it has to do with masking and rejection sensitivity or something like it.

Looking at the art, it's certainly very skilled and detailed - which does come up in a lot of positive reviews I saw. I also feel like Azuma hits a good balance of setting the scene with detail but also not being afraid to simplify things to draw attention to what is important; sometimes it feels like, when it comes to detail, creators are either all or nothing, so this was really nice.

Writing wise, I also felt like Azuma hit a similar good balance when it comes to wordiness. A+

Looking at gender and sexuality, I thought this first volume introduced us to an interesting cast of characters, none of them super gendered, and who all happen to find themselves outside of heterosexual monogomy. Especially when it comes up at the end that Yotsuba is sort of unofficially adopted and not the father's biological spawn. Of course none of them are actually queer either... and we shall see how this plays out going forward. In the negative column there's a very awkward point where family friend Jumbo refers to one of the sisters who live next door as jailbait.

Race is so far not really explored to any depth. That said, there does seem to be some racial diversity at play in that at the very end of this volume we are told that Yotsuba was kind of unofficially adopted by the father character when he was oversees? Which gives off very odd vibes as well, but I'm assuming is mostly to set up how different and generally ignorant Yotsuba is without feeling a need to go into too much detail. Although it could also be setting Yotsuba ends up to be an alien or something. Anything is possible.

Class and ability vs disability were not things that seemed to be explored in this volume.

To conclude, this continues to be a bit of an odd read for me but I am intrigued and will certainly be picking up more soon. I think I'll be rating this volume three out of five stars.