Setoutsumi

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Setoutsumi is, in true meaning of the word, a hidden gem. It is a completely translated manga available on Amazon. And yet it doesn't have even 1000 MAL members at the time of this review. So, I will try my best to push for it. This is not a critically accurate review, but I will try my best.

Story: 10/10
It is a slice of life manga at its core, and the story is almost non-existent. Each chapter basically follows the same template - two high-school boys hanging out after school near a river bank and having mundane conversations, sometimes involving supporting characters. Not dissimilar set-ups have ... been used many times before, so what makes it different? The answer is how the author has used this set-up to his creativity. There are sometimes chapter where the same situation on riverbank plays from different vantage points to surprise the readers; sometimes an expected character shows up instead of our two protagonists; sometimes many characters involved in seemingly different activities on the riverbank end up getting caught in each other's way; and so on.
But the reason I gave the story a 10/10 is because of the writing. I am not sure if I am supposed to include that here, but I am going ahead with that for now. The dialogues and conversations between the two boys, Seto and Utsumi, and by far the strongest aspect of this manga. They are clever, funny, inventive, and written in a very simple style to cap it off. Many different manga equates clever writing style with complex writing style (you know, where they strive for complex word plays and unnatural dialogues), but Setoutsumi keeps it simple, easy to read, and (something I don't really like to use for a manga or anime) relatable.
Also, if you (understandably) still confused why this warrants a 10/10 story, you have to read the last 4 chapters to understand it. I won't be giving any spoilers here, but the ending of this manga is what made me give the story a 10. For a slice of life, you can never expect the writing to be so tight and uniform in quality.

Art: 7/10
Nothing of note here; the art is pretty much serviceable for a manga like this. Character designs are simple and relatively realistic. Characters don't look as beautiful as Katsuzo Hirata's, but neither as ugly as Taiyou Matsumoto's. They are average looking people which serves well for the whole theme of two average Japanese high school boys well. It also doesn't have any exaggerated facial expressions or physical reactions of straight man routine for art to shine (as in something like Grand Blue).

Character: 9/10
Though eighty-percent of the manga is just about two characters, it never gets boring. Both the characters have a very generic character traits - Seto is the outgoing, loud, idiot character while Utsumi is the apathetic, intelligent one. However, the realistic execution of these generic traits somehow makes them feel unique. Like, Seto is a loud character. but he doesn't go about yelling all the time. Similarly, Utsumi is apathetic, but it doesn't mean he couldn't be funny or couldn't be aware of his surroundings. And both of them are written with an impeccable consistency throughout.
Supporting cast is a bit meh. Even though both protagonists may also appear one-dimensional, we spend enough time with them to understand them and appreciate the nuances of their traits and discover more aspects of their personalities. Rest of the cast is pretty much one note with a particular role to serve, be it a love interest or running gag.

Enjoyment: 10/10
Here, I am only putting my thoughts without trying to be objective. The comedy is great and perhaps one of the best I have read in some time in a manga. Not declaring them bad or anything, but I had grown tired of comedy manga's attempts at comedy being limited to familiar situations, an irritatingly loud straight-man routine, exaggerated facial expressions, chibi forms, or a combination of all these. Compared to them, Setoutsumi feels so much refreshing and even more hilarious.
Something else that I really enjoyed is how well it did its Slice of Life parts. Most in the genre have a problem which i have grown to hate - a series of simple, chill moments is suddenly interrupted by a dramatic chapter which is, more often than not, heavy-handed and jarring. Setoutsumi has many similar pitfalls. However, it avoids all of them and when it comes to handling drama and transition, it did it rather smoothly.
For the sheer ingenuity of what appears to be a generic Comedy/Slice of Life to manage the tropes and execution this well, this manga deserves more love.

Overall: 10/10
A little biased? Maybe. I won't go ahead and say that everyone will enjoy this as much as I did. But if you like either of Comedy or Slice of Life, I would be surprised if you don't find this interesting.

TL;DR: Really funny manga with dialogue based comedy, strong writing, and totally deserving of your time. Not really long either (I completed the whole thing in 5 hours). Also, read the whole thing; it has a (rare) amazing ending.

TL;DR: it's a shorter Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei aka it's a comedy until it blows your fucking mind.

The comedy is unique and well executed. The author utilizes multiperspectivity pretty well considering the genre, and that the setting is, for the most part, the same place by a river.
Think Durarara or Baccano, or the recent Odd Taxi (Which is written by the same author as this manga) but as a slice of life comedy.
Could a situation that gets told twice, or even thrice sometimes, still hold up comically just because it's from the perspective of another character? That's obviously a rhetorical question, because the answer is ... yes, and this manga proves it.
At face value seeing the same thing from the perspective of another character that's sitting inches away from a character whose perspective we have already seen might seem like a cheap excuse to recycle previous panels or even entire pages, which it might actually be, but the execution is masterful and the payoff is worth it.

It's episodic in nature, so there is no overarching plot, although callbacks to stories told in previous chapters often occur. Which in the end culminate in the author pointing out every single piece of foreshadowing he had put in the earlier chapters to create a remarkable ending.

While mostly comedic, some chapters are more serious in tone than others, but it doesn't feel out of place, largely because it comes off as natural with how realistic the characters are. There aren't many characters, but the author does a good job of making the ones that do appear memorable. If anything, this is probably the only manga where you'd take the words of a Belarusian character dressed up as a clown seriously.

Do you know the band Boston? Imagine you knew only the song "More than a Feeling", and you heard "Peace of Mind" on the radio for the first time. If you heard that particular Tom Scholz Rockman amp sound playing some corny 70's arena melody behind some shrill mustachioed vocal line, wouldn't you place it on the same album right away in your mind?

>99% of people who read SetoUtsumi after 2021 will be following Odd Taxi's writer Kazuya Konomoto into his limited catalog, hoping to find anything else that has any of the particular magic of that anime's screenplay. I'm happy to report that SetoUtsumi ... has it. You can read any one or two of the episodic chapters before volume 8 and immediately smell the same snappy dialogue (smart talk between dumb characters), a mishmashing of an eclectic cast, and the invisible undercurrent of a much heavier overarching plot than two bros chattin' with a clown after school.

The art is meh. I would say it's passable (6ish); more experienced manga fetishists would probably say it's worse than that. Like all comedy, the humor is hit or miss depending on the reader, although I think Konomoto's character dialogue and situational irony are usually interesting enough to deliver most of the punchlines even if it isn't 100% your jam. A lot of the secondary characters have depth that is more hinted at than explored, so there are only 2 truly interesting minds to get to know.

With those unimportant demerits out of the way, this whole manga reeks of Odd Taxi to me from start to finish. It's that same Rockman (Boston) sound. So much of what that show did well bleeds through here. Maybe the translation I read was just particularly skillful, but the fact that each episodic chapter found a way to slice home into something I identified with despite the language barrier and despite Konomoto presumably having very different life experience to me was rewarding and haunting. Konomoto's writing gets comped a lot to Tarantino, but to me, his writing feels different in ways that are personally important to me. Tarantino is probably the best at writing the punchy dialogue of cool characters. Konomoto is equally adept at writing the punchy dialogue of seriously uncool characters. I am still shocked by the gripping, heavy, funny and seriously lame nonsense that these characters get out on the routine every chapter, and I love it. The dumb-character/smart-writing trick that Konomoto pulls out of his sleeve every chapter is the best thing about his manga and his anime (because, to me, after reading this manga, Odd Taxi is now His show).

All that said, this is a dark/grey comedy slice of life manga. Target audience for that is probably very small. Please give this a chance anyway, especially if you loved Odd Taxi. Odd Taxi is a better product, but lofi anthropomorphic animal mystery comedy thriller also probably had a miniscule target audience and blew that out of the water. Everything that made OT special is as-good or almost-as-good in SU. It also validates that the best part of OT was the writing, and that the writing is real and real good. Konomoto's hype train needs to be max capacity going forward.

And if, God forbid, you're the <1% that didn't come here from OT, I can sell this manga a different way. Have you ever read a slice-of-life manga with a {built-up, closed, emotionally satisfying, thematically consistent, dumb-character/smart-writing, Capital 'G'} Great ending?