Review for The Comic Artist & His Assistants Complete Series Collection & Bonus OVA Episodes

Introduction

The half hour is the sweet-spot with anime releases it seems. When episodic television anime gets released to home media in the West, it seems it’s always the 20-odd minute episodes (often with an eye-catch where the adverts are meant to go); certainly 99% of my TV anime collection is that way. It wasn’t always so. Certainly in the age of the OVA back in the nineties, anime episodes would be as long as they needed to be, destined as they were for direct to video sale, and I still have a few tapes with hour-long episodes on. But the reverse is also true, and in fact a lot more common, especially now. There are a lot of anime shows out there that run to just five or ten minutes in length. It’s the logical size for a show based on something like a four panel gag manga, a short and sweet hit of comedy, shows that just couldn’t sustain over half an hour.


Crunchyroll is replete with such anime, and these days a lot of shorter anime are released directly online, skipping the television broadcasts altogether (It’s how Time of Eve was first released). But short run anime almost never make it to home video in the West. I have a few examples in my collection, The Adventures of Mini-Goddess, Haruhi-Chan Suzumiya and Nyoron Tsuruya-San, Cromartie High School, and the You’re Under Arrest OVAs, but more often than not the only short form anime we get to see on disc are bonus OVA episodes that get bundled with long form series. But Animatsu are giving a short form series a try again in the UK, after Sentai released it in the US. 2014 saw quite a few noteworthy short-form anime, and if one was going to be released, I really wanted it to be the comically imaginative Tonari no Seki-kun. We’re getting The Comic Artist and His Assistants instead though, which is almost as good. This release also offers 6, never before streamed OVAs.


Yuki Aito is a pervert. He spends his days thinking about scantily clad girls, lingerie, upskirt shots, buying panties and smutty magazines. On the plus side, he does make a living at it, as he is the creator of the Shyness Cafe Latte manga, a work replete with scantily clad girls, and a visual aesthetic that centres of the panty shot. And like all mangaka, he needs assistants to help him create his opus, do the work of inking out the artwork, applying the screen-tones, all the busywork while he creates. As fate would have it, his assistants are all young and pretty girls, the strict Sahoto Ashisu, the warm Rinna Fuwa, and the irritable Sena Kuroi. His editor is the even more irritable Mihari Otosuna. What’s an assistant to do when a comic artist needs a visual reference for a booby grope? Beat the comic artist down with a big stick of course...


12 episodes plus six OVAs are presented on this Blu-ray disc from Animatsu.

1. Master the Boobs!/The Dream Job/Panty Wars/Mihari Otosuna’s Day Off
2. The New Assistant/That’s Most Important/Together For the First Time
3. Smutty Magazine Panic/Can I Nurse Her to Health/The Black Comet
4. S & M/The Mascot Character/Introducing Bra-Mew/Seventeen Mihari
5. Shock in the Part/Someday/Using Those Around You For Inspiration
6. Let’s Go to a Hot Spring
7. The Attack of the Little Sister/Their Night Together/A Piggyback for the Super-Assistant
8. Looked Over By the Editor-In-Chief/To Feel Like a Girl/Overdoing It
9. Past Mistakes
10. Sena’s Close Call/I’ll Cheer You On!/Rain Talk
11. The Feared Transformation/You Can Do It Sena/Know Thyself
12. Progress/The End of Summer/Psychological Profiling Using Underwear

OVAs
13. Ashisu’s Holiday/You Never Know Until You Try
14. The Dreaming Comic Artist
15. Study Date
16. Protect the Cute
17. Little Sister vs. Editor-in-Chief
18. Perfect Day for a Nap/When Assistants Snap

Picture

The Comic Artist and His Assistants gets a 1.78:1 widescreen transfer at 1080p resolution. It’s a fine transfer of a not overly complex anime. It’s all bright, primary colours, simple character designs, basic, but energetic animation, just what you would expect for a short form, gag format. There were no problems with compression or banding that I could see, and the animation itself was smooth and fluid. While Comic Artist may be a budget animation, it does still have its unique touches, with characters apt to drop into manga style artwork to emphasise the punchlines, or accentuate the ‘drama’ of a situation. It all works well to tell the story.

The images in this review are sourced from the PR, and aren’t necessarily representative of the final retail release.

Sound

Comic Artist gets a sole DTS-HD MA 2.0 Japanese track, with locked translated subtitles. They are accurately timed, free of error, and easy to read. The dialogue is clear throughout, and the comedy flows well, with suitable music, and a couple of nice, if brief theme songs. The actors are cast perfectly for their roles, and of course Rie Kugimiya voices the pint-sized blonde tsundere.

Extras

I got to take a look at the final product this time around, and Comic Artist is presented on one Blu-ray disc, packaged in a standard Blu-ray Amaray. The sleeve is reversible, with the outer image offering the assistants in swimwear poses, with the blurb on the back, while the inner sleeve has them dressed more demurely, facing an episode listing. Oddly enough the episode titles listed on the sleeve, differ from the episode titles listed on the disc, and both of these lists differ from the episode titles used by Crunchyroll. You get the general idea though. Each episode is followed by a 45 second translated English credit reel, and the disc presents its content with a static menu screen.


Extras on the disc comprise 6 Japanese promos running to 4:21, the textless opening, two textless closings, the so called Karaoke Version of the Episode 12 closing (the lyrics are in translated English, not romanji Japanese, so you can’t exactly sing along), and finally trailers for Space Brothers, Hayate The Combat Butler, Kamigami no Asobi, and The Familiar of Zero F. All the extras are in 1080p, except for the Hayate trailer, which is a 1080i upscale.

Conclusion

The Comic Artist and His Assistants has no redeeming value whatsoever. It’s your standard harem set-up, an ineffectual male, surrounded by a bevy of beautiful females, all ready to dish out varying brands of extreme punishment, should he transgress the bounds of acceptable behaviour. Given that he’s a manga artist whose title sells on the strength of its panty shots, unacceptable behaviour is pretty much par for the course, beginning with the opening episode where he wants his assistant to allow her boobs to be groped so that he can have a reference image to draw from. It’s crass, it’s lowbrow comedy... it’s also funny, which is the whole point. If a show can make you laugh, then it’s doing something right, and the means it uses to elicit those laughs can be excused.


Having said all that, I found that I didn’t enjoy it as much this time, as I did when Crunchyroll streamed it. The weekly broadcast schedule allowed for enough of a gap so that its comic strengths stayed in the mind, while its weaknesses faded to the background. That isn’t possible if you’re marathoning the show over a couple of days, and the missteps it repeats become more obvious. At the time, I was also somewhat taken with the manga artist subject matter, a comedy take on Bakuman for want of a better analogy, and the obsession, the artistry, the glimpse into the manga industry seemed somewhat refreshing. However since then, I’ve started watching Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun, another comedy about a manga artist and his assistants, and it is by far the superior show.


In Comic Artist, we have the artist as main character, Yuki Aito, the typical anime milquetoast, obsessed with scantily clad women, and underwear to an otaku degree, but making a living out of his obsession by creating a manga. He’s totally ineffectual when it comes to actual women, which might explain why so many women tolerate his perversions. Sahoto Ashisu is his sole assistant when we start the show, an aspiring manga artist who respects Aito for his talents, if not for his personality. She’s strict, knows where to draw the line, and can shoot Aito down with a harsh glance or a sharp word (when that doesn’t work, there’s always a German Suplex). It’s his editor Mihari Otosuna who is quick to violence when Aito steps out of line (although she’s compensating for briefly having a crush on Aito when they went to high school together). Sena Kuroi is also quick to violence, although as voiced by the inimitable Rie Kugimiya, she is textbook tsundere, hard on the outside and soft on the inside. She’s also young for her talent, and gets treated like a kid (which annoys her), but when she takes to beating Aito, she lacks the adult strength to the degree that it awakens Aito’s masochist tendencies. Then there is Aito’s second assistant, Rinna Fuwa, who actually likes Aito, and accommodates his eccentricities, rather than react to them.


Speaking of childlike, we also occasionally get to see the Editor-in-Chief, who looks younger than Sena, has a dry and manipulative sense of humour, and a tendency not to wear underwear. We also see Ashisu’s little sister Sahono on a couple of occasions, but that’s pretty much it for the characters, except for the cat that they adopt, and who quickly becomes the mascot for the manga, Bra-Mew.


It’s mostly short form comedy as you might tell from the subdivided episode titles; a simple matter of set-up and punchline, with a hope that it turns out to be funny. Given that you get three or even four sketches to a 13 minute run time (including 2 minutes of credits), there will be something funny in the average episode. It’s all lowbrow humour, beginning with that booby grope research in the first episode I mentioned. So if panic about pornography, mixed bathing at a hot springs, cross-dressing and male breastfeeding, toilet emergency in a lift, and drunken nudity is the sort of thing that will make you smirk, then by all means The Comic Artist & His Assistants will fill that hole in your anime collection.


The problems with the show are mainly two-fold. For one thing, it doesn’t use its characters all that well. As a mascot character, you won’t be surprised that Bra-Mew isn’t in the show that much, but then again neither is Rinna Fuwa. It becomes problematic when a female character actually likes the male lead, as there’s less comedy that way. A comic trip falling face first into boobs has to be met with violence, not a hug and a caress, so the warm caring one is really only there to be protected from Aito, and from herself. The other thing with the characters is that the joke is usually on Aito and one or more of his assistants, there really isn’t enough of the assistants interacting with each other, nothing in the way of character development.


The second flaw is that while the show starts strongly, it really shoots its comic wad in the early episodes, and as it comes towards the end of the season, the jokes become simpler and more clichéd, and the originality and spark of the opening half of the season fades away. It does come back somewhat for the final six OVA episodes, where broadcast standards no longer apply, and things can get a tad raunchier. But the series is lacking in consistency.


The Comic Artist & His Assistants is fun, the kind of disposable fun that can very easily take up ten minutes or so of your time. It’s not the best example of the short form anime, but it had me laughing more often than not. If slightly offensive harem comedy is your thing, then this is the disc to get.