What a Wonderful World! Volumes 1 & 2

Only one modern manga creator would write a scene where a man is suddenly run over by a truck and his friends start laughing with joy. That creator is Inio Asano, and there’s no way to understand the man, or the laughter, or the truck without reading What a Wonderful World!

The latest crop of manga in VIZ's Signature line includes works by two must-read creators: Natsume Ono (not simple, House of Five Leaves, Ristorante Paradiso) and Inio Asano. Asano’s What a Wonderful World! is a collection of short stories: some brilliant, some forgettable, but all worth reading.

Inio Asano is one of the best new manga creators, hands down. What a Wonderful World!, begun in 2002 when he was all of 22 years old, was his first published work. As a collection of short stories connected by a handful of recurring incidents, this debut work lacks the complexity of his graphic novels Nijigahara Holograph and Solanin. Nevertheless, the trademark Asano elements are here: effortlessly naturalistic art, a fascination with drifting young people who aren't quite sure what to do with their lives, and a cynical perspective on the harshness of the world leavened by moments of whimsy and fantasy.

Asano has a gift for capturing characters with just a few lines of dialogue and strokes of the pen. These characters include a college dropout and her ex-punk boyfriend trying to survive in the corporate sector; a bullied little girl who signs up for a dangerous competition to become "king" of the class; a thief on the run from the mob who hides his identity beneath a cartoon bear suit; a frustrated manga artist; a boy who's way too young to be in cram school; and a cook estranged from his proud ramen-cooking family.

Some stories are better than others; they range from fleshed-out explorations of the characters to short, sketchy vignettes. The recurring theme is the relentless cruelty of the world and the effort to eke out joy and meaning by any means possible. The protagonists are often forced to choose between rebelling against the system or giving in to get by. Rebellion isn't always the best choice -- sometimes, it's revealed, it's not even a real option.

Asano loops back to some characters over and over, teasing us with hints about their fates. The dropout later appears as a high-school teacher; did she go back to school? Her boyfriend repeatedly vacillates between his white-collar career and his musical ambitions; will he ever figure out what he wants? If nothing else, the stories suggest, life goes on.

Asano peppers his slice-of-life stories with magical realism. A girl is followed by a talking crow who voices her anxieties. A pet turtle climbs out of its shell and becomes a tiny turtle-headed man. A dog turns into a girl. A man dies and drifts around the city. The last stories refer to a strange plague that turns people into inert shells: "In a way, it's a pretty convenient illness for the modern man."

Even if What a Wonderful World! is uneven, it's hard to believe that it's the artist's debut work. The art is polished and immediately appealing, filled with well-observed detail (the insides of people's apartments look like they belong to those particular people). He also loves to draw moments of exuberant action, characters poised in flight. The writing is crisp, funny, and compassionate. It only makes sense when you read the rest of Asano's manga and realize that he just keeps getting better.

Shaenon Garrity is a manga editor, writer and comics creator. She is the author of CLAMP in America, and the creator of Narbonic.