Episode 50 - Good Night Pun Pun by Inio Asano

Stand by Me has nothing on this one! In this episode I discuss  the Manga, Good Night Punpun. This coming of age story follows PunPun, a near faceless school boy in the 90s who lives through a Stephen King Novel.

Next Week! PTSD Radio Omnibus 1 by Masaaki Nakayama

Hosted by Vic, I used to use my middle name, Adam. 

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Transcript

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Hey everybody, and welcome to the Comic Books Beyond Podcast. On this show, we're all about helping new or old readers find new stories. We focus on accessibility and demystifying the weird stuff, but we try to keep the magic alive and we are anti-gatekeeping. Hey everybody, and welcome to the Comic Books Beyond Podcast. I'm your host, Vic, and today we are here to talk about a little book called Good Night Poon Poon. So, first off, if you're this is your first time hanging out with us, what we like to do is talk about books and try to help you guys find new books to enjoy. Uh now this month is manga month, and we are talking about um the darker side of manga. Uh, for the most part, all our books this month are going to be horror themed. There's one that's I guess questionable, but if you want to call it horror, I'm not gonna argue with you. And hell, I probably would make it horror too. So today we are talking about uh Goodnight Pun Pun. Now, I first heard about Goodnight Pun Pun or Pun Pun um maybe two, three years ago. Um, I I I found this on a uh YouTube video about dark manga. I don't remember the name of the video, I don't remember the name of the creator, um, but uh the selling point for me was this is the darkest manga that I could not recommend someone in good conscience um read. And uh I think it kind of lives up to um that set of expectations. So the real question is if anyone knows anything about Goodnight Poon Poon, how the fuck can I make this fun for anybody? Truthfully, I I don't know if I can, but I'm sure as heck gonna try. Uh so before we get into the episode proper, just a reminder: the Junji Ito poll is still up. Uh, just shoot us an email or drop a comment in the Junji Ito episode. Go back, listen to it. It is episode 48 of the show, which makes this episode 50. Um it's kind of surprising that we got to episode 50, but uh I want to keep going. Uh, hopefully I can get the other hosts here more often. Schedules are just not working out the way we should. Um, you know, like I said, Garnet works two jobs. Uh Cottie's got a lot going on with her new job and just some other stuff she's working on. Uh Mike is actually traveling as I'm recording. Uh Beef has a lot going on with, you know, just being a dad and a husband. And um, you know, he's got his one, he works uh with a volunteer group pretty heavily. Uh so all all good stuff happening and uh want to get some collabs going, but it's just been hard for me to schedule that on all that good stuff. So for this episode, I kind of want to just bring up like a couple plot points of various uh chapters here just to kind of give you an introduction of what we're talking about. Uh, I I want to make good night pun pun fun, fun, fun, but there's not really a way to do that. Um so I'm just going through my notes really quick and we're just gonna try to have some fun with this one. I think the fun's gonna be maybe uh me screwing up a few times, I think. Uh so what is goodnight pun pun? Uh this was written by uh I apologies on the name here, in Ineo Asano. Uh this is about it's kind of a coming of age tale slice of life story. Uh so if you're into that, you know that this might be your jam, but it does go pretty dark and it doesn't exactly start off super fun either. I apparently haven't gotten to the really dark stuff. Now, I read the first uh omnibus of this. Um, I think manga format omnibus is a little different than what we're used to. We did get uh 24 chapters here, but my smallest Omni is 30. Um, but this does collect the first two trade paperback volumes of this. Uh so this is about a school child who I want to say he's like fifth, sixth grade, somewhere around there. I think Japanese school works a little bit different than ours. So uh they consider him like late elementary school, early middle school by the end of this. Pun pun doesn't exactly have a great home life. Uh, you know, father unemployed, alcoholic. Uh, mom is doing her best, and uh the kind of the kickoff of this is that the girl he likes moves away, but a new girl comes into town and immediately he gets fat infatuated with her. And uh the mom and the um husband, there's there's in quotes a break-in at the house, and the husband was knocked out cold. I interpreted this for a while that the father was killed by the wife. I still believe she hit him, but I he wasn't I I'm not sure. So there's another scene that leads me to believe the father was not dead. Um, trying not to be too spoilery here, but spoilers for the first like volume and a half of Goodnight Pun Pun, uh, if you're hanging out with us. Now, Pun Pun or Pun Pun, I'm not honestly entirely sure how we pronounce that. Uh, Pun Pun is just a kid, but he kind of looks more like a highly stylized caricature of like a bird. Um the bird, I the from what I understand, the reason that he looks like this is so the artist Megaka can do weird stuff with him or like whatever he needs for the plot. Like apparently this gets really dark and pun pun gets like utterly terrifying. The rest of the caricatures or characters in this, they they have a style to them, but I would not call this particularly heavily stylized art. Um if you were to just like catch some screen caps online, they all look pretty it it it's hard to describe, I guess. I I don't like saying they look standard, but there's a lot of exaggerated features in some people. But for for the most part, this is just like if you think of unstylized your your your basic art, that's what this is. It's just done in a terrifying way with some certain subtlety. Uh so I I guess we should get disclaimers out of the way, disclaimers for uh honestly, if you're sensitive at all, probably there's something in here that would bother you. Um there's stuff in here that made me need to stop reading a few times. Uh the the thing is about pun pun, it's very this one's hard to talk about because it's the subtlety in what is done with uh goodnight pun pun. It's the little passing lines that kind of scare me. It's the background shots, it's uh just the small stuff that gets there. Uh it's the way eyes look, it's the way frames are set up. Everything in this book is done to unnerve you. Uh, it's like if you've ever paused a horror movie at the right time and you see a ghost in the background, that's what you're dealing with heavily in pun pun. Uh now I got through the first uh 24 chapters, and I'm just gonna go through like some super basic plot points, and I'm gonna have to uh keep this limited because there's some stuff here. So I already said the inciting incident is the mom probably tried to kill the father. Um, but he continues on in his life in school. He's uh finds out that the earth is being overpopulated and he wants to help. Uh, so you can tell he's got a good heart. So you can tell he's probably got a good heart, and he tries to he writes an essay about how he wants to solve the earth population um by helping everyone migrate to outer space, but he kind of chickens out and doesn't give the uh essay at school. But the girl he finds he likes Aiko, uh, she finds the essay that he throws out and is impressed by it. Um, this shows him being more in love with Aiko as it goes along. We learn that he has this uh prayer. So Pun Pun talks to God a little bit in this. I shouldn't should have written this down, but it's like dear God, dear God, Tinklehoi. This is the name of his uh little this is the little prayer he does to talk to God. Now God does come to visit him in this, and I think that God might be a self-insert of the um author, but in a stylized way. Uh it's he shows up throughout there and his religious beliefs are challenged throughout this, like him just using God to take solace in something. Uh he's in a club at school called the Porn Watchers Club or PWC for short. This is about kids at school watching porn together, and uh they they they don't show any like nudity of the children, want to be clear on that one. Like on the back of the book, it's flat out says, you know, he wants to find some porn. Like this is a pretty horny book. Uh, so it might make you pretty uncomfortable to watch a story or read a story about kids watching porn together. And trust me, it's about to get weirder. Um, I'm uncomfortable watching reading a story about kids watching porn together. Um, at least there's no chill children nudity for the love of thank God. So we find out that his mom was injured and she is coming home, but he's really not happy that she's coming home uh because his relationship with his mom isn't exactly great. Um he goes to Porn Watchers Club, and we're I'm actually glossing over a few things because it's kind of gross in here. Like there's some clear masturbation references. Um, when they go to Porn Watchers Club, they find out uh that there's a serial killer who actually taped over the pornography and is uh giving them instructions on where to find his treasure. I'm not joking. This is really messed up. Uh so they want to, or Aiko wants Poon Poon to or wants to go to another city together with uh Poon Poon called uh Kagashima. And uh Poon Poon remembers that you know the uh serial killer dude on the Born Watchers tape, he had instructed them where to find some gold, and it's in an old Miso soup factory. So they go to the old Miso soup factory exploring as kids did. Uh, you know, they um they don't find the treasure there, but they did find there were some bodies just murdered there, and eventually this kind of leads to Poon Poon and Aiko to really not see each other anymore just because kids fall away. And I'm cutting out a lot of this stuff. Um, so as far as characters go, the only real characters that are developed here are Poon Poon, his mom to a small degree, and his uncle to a degree who his uncle's watching him. Uh or is it uncle or cousin? I think it's uncle. It's his mom's brother, so that would be his uncle. Um, yeah, you can tell how good at family I am. Um he uh his uncle is definitely like the slacker type. And there's this scene early on that I interpreted that the uncle might have been inappropriate with him, but it could have just been the uncle not knowing how to process having a child like around. And so I I don't know which is which. Again, only read the first 24. So if you guys are sitting there laughing, telling me about how dark this is gonna get, great for you. And I'm probably gonna keep going until I know about. Uh overall, this is hard to say if I would actually recommend this manga. It's not even just because it's so dark. And like I said, there's some dark and uncomfortable things here, like questioning your own religion, your parents breaking apart, uh, being exposed to serial killers, the children being children. And as much as I hate to say this, this is a pretty accurate representation of what kids do in small poor communities in the 90s. Like this is a very 90s-coded uh series. There's a part where they're playing a PlayStation 1, which I think is just like our flag to say this is the 90s in here. Now, I grew up, uh I was born in '88, so I lived through most of the 90s, and we were little shits back then. Like I didn't even hang out with the bad kids. Like, I was definitely not cool enough for that. But just like some of the kids that we we would hang out with and play baseball, like I can remember one kid swung another, swung a bat at me and then at another kid, they broke windows, and uh, you know, I didn't want to be involved with that. And we were not the bad kids by any stretch of the imagination. Like I've seen I like I knew kids who caused a forest fire. Uh, some kids like almost burned down a church two houses over from me. I I'm not kidding. Uh, just because they thought it would be funny to stick fireworks inside of an awning. Um, the fire department stopped it, so you know. But kids get bored and go outside and do dumb shit. I don't know if current generation of kids would still do that, but I have to imagine that, you know, every Stephen King novel that ever existed is still probably happening in some way. So I don't know if I would actually recommend Good Night Poon Poon, just because like the stuff in this book is it's not horrifying in the traditional sense. It's there to make you uncomfortable. A story about kids watching pornography together, not exactly the most pleasant thing to think about. A story about childhood trauma, and it's all that is, is again, not the most pleasant. And I really have to ask myself, is this the kind of dark story that I'm gonna get something out of? And so far, I'm able to connect with it because I lived through a lot of this. Like my home life wasn't great. I was never overtly abused. Uh, my dad was out of the picture by the time I was like two, and like my mom did her best, like I said, but she never hit the shit out of me or anything like that. Oh, I'd I mean, I got choke-slammed into a couch once because I was being a little piece of shit. And you know, every parent needs to choke-slam their kid into a couch like at least once, uh, probably just going on from experience. Um, but there's some stuff with Pun Pun's mom in here that's never outright said. Like, you never see the violence in this book. Um, you see the aftermath, you see the aura of the violence, and that's kind of what scares me. Like, you we we talk about what you don't see is the scariest part, and that's on full display here. Like, um, how many movies have been ruined because they show the monster at the end after the buildup? This, you never really see the monster. Like, there's a character in here named Shit God. Uh, that's this other kid who's talking to God, like Pun Pun talks to God, and he's just kind of this dude who looks vaguely like the creator. I I don't know if it's the same, supposed to be a self-insert or not. But there's another kid who also talks to God who wants to teach him the Kamihameha from DBZ. Uh now, again, it's shit God. He is God, but he has, let's just call it chocolate ice cream all over the face, obscuring it. Uh, this is a pretty easy interpretation that there's some strange religious stuff in this book. Like, I'm not a religious person, but if I was and I was questioning my own religion, like I did go through that. I I grew up in a very Catholic household. I still, I still to this day have some issues uh criticizing religion. And I don't care what religion anyone is. I I think if you want to practice religion and you're not using it to oppress people or hurt anybody, awesome, that's good for you. I just am not one of those people. But when you are going through that REM song of losing your religion, that's a hard, hard thing to go through. So, pun pun, there's some heavy stuff in here without it ever being gory. Like, I won't say there's not a single drop of blood in this. There's some other bodily fluids, but there's no real blood, there's no violence, there's no gore. This is the kind of psychological horror that sticks with you. I don't know how much more of this I can read. Now, this is where I kind of come down to. I love slice of life storytelling, but I think slice of life storytelling needs to be pretty finite or needs to be a break in the story. This is like a 20-sum chapter manga, and I want to finish it because I just don't like leaving things DNF'd. And I I subscribe to the uh Viz app. You have to read it on a desktop. This is one of those things they don't let you read on, you know, the app. Like there's shown and jump, then there's viz. Viz proper has this, not shown and jump, from what I found. So I I don't know if I want to keep going, but I'm gonna keep going for a little bit, while a little while. It's not like it's getting boring or anything, it's not like nothing's happening. It's like the things that are happening are just really unpleasant, and it's like I just need a break from it more often than not. And I I will also say that the omnibus I bought like two years ago, it's got this really weird cover that's just got a feel to it that I don't like. I don't know if this was done intentional, but it wouldn't surprise me. Like everything about this book is done in a way to make you want to nope out. Like, I'm just flipping through this now, and certain of the character caricatures in here, the faces are just exaggerated in such twisted ways, and the adult reactions are just weird, but is that kind of like what being a kid's about? You know, when you're a child, you think of things in really exaggerated ways because your brain doesn't know how to make sense of it. You probably have some memories that aren't exactly how it happened because you just don't know how to really put it in into words, or even into memory, or or like even into pictures. And like I'm looking at just some of the faces and the expressions of pain on these, and it's not it's not physical pain, it's literal mental anguish. And this Magaka's pretty good at drawing tears and sadness, and that's not a sentence I thought I would ever say. And like the best way I could describe what Punpen looks like, he's basically a ghost with a little beak on him. He's basically faceless, and he's got just the kind of self-image that you know some of us have some days. And it it's a it's a rough book. I don't I think I've read worse than this. Like, I I do think um Blood on the Tracks or Trail of Blood uh would be probably a lot more triggering to most people, me especially. Uh, but Pun Pun is just like unpleasant. Uh to put this in video game terms, if you've ever played a Souls game, there's a usually a level in there that's like a rot world that's made out of poison that overall the level isn't too bad, and bosses are usually worse, but the level is just unpleasant. You have to constantly micromanage and overthink everything to get through it. It sucks. If I had to give a couple of criticisms to this story, is I do actually think some of the characters are from what I've read so far are a bit underdeveloped. And I say, you know, it's serialized storytelling, they're going to get more development over time, but I've read 24-25 chapters, which is about maybe one-sixth of the story if my math is correct there. In terms of quality, and if I would recommend this, I would only recommend this if you just want to feel not good. And I would actually recommend this digitally. That's that's my quality rating on this. Like, I I actually think I'm gonna sell my copy and go back and just read it digitally, unless I absolutely fall in love with this. Like I'm gonna hold on to it. I'm gonna read the rest of my rest of it digitally. And if this has some kind of life-altering effect, then maybe I will. Uh, but like I said last week with Fire Punch, it was a dark story that helped me get through something there, that helped me process my feelings that I wasn't feeling very good of, and I'm still not feeling the best. Pun pun isn't wrecking my mood or anything. It's just an unenjoyable read, and it's not bad writing. It's just kind of depressing. Whew. Okay, so I don't know if I sold this book to anybody, or maybe I did. Like I I saw a video where people were just talking about like extreme horror and stuff, and saying that, you know, uh all the these like Christian conservative moms and shit were burning these horrible books, and you know, that's the best advertising ever because that just made me want to know what it was. You ban a book, I want to know what it is. But this one, I'm not trying to sell it to you or not trying to dissuade you from reading it. Uh, I think if you're curious, the Viz app is a great way to go because it's like for I'm not trying to advertise for Viz or anything right now. Uh, I just found out about it, and like you can read it free for seven days and then cancel and just move on. Uh digital apps are pretty good, but as far as like investing money into this, I really just don't think I could recommend that in good conscience. But yeah, overall, like it's great art, it's solid storytelling, it's slice of life if the slice was a piece of pizza that was left in the garbage can that someone had to eat up like two days later. I mean, I think this thematically hits the three-part harmony of storytelling. This is a pretty good character for the right story with themes like the way he's uh weaving these together of just the nothing self, the nothing reflection into a story of about childhood coming of age when you're starting to question all your life and you have a shit home life and you're still trying to make the best of it. I mean, that's standard storytelling. It's just so unpleasant to read that I don't know if I'm gonna keep going with it. I'm well, I'm going to. I'm just, I don't know how much further I'm going to get. Okay. Anyway. So uh this has been the 50th episode of this show. Uh, I hope I hope you guys are enjoying it. Uh, next week, we are actually gonna do something that's actually fun that I do like a lot. Uh, it's gonna be Chainsaw Man. And I'm gonna hope we get somebody on the show if we can. Uh, Chainsaw Man is available on the Shun and Jump app, probably also the Viz app. Uh, it's really cheap if you just want to buy it. Really recommend checking out the anime. Uh, it's the anime that kind of made me like anime more, and then I'm really excited to get into that one. But anyway, guys, you have yourselves a great week, and we're gonna go to credits. Take care. Well, guys, thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get a hold of me through email, I'm at comicbooksbeyond at gmail.com, and I'm at comic books beyond on Blue Sky, Instagram, TikTok, and we're also on YouTube. Some of the podcasts are gonna go there, but we're also working on some extra content for YouTube as well. I'd like to give a thank you to the crew of the Talking Comic Books Podcast, Brad and Lease of Comic Book Couples Counseling, Alex Jaffey, Jeremy Whitley, Bran McNulty, Jimmy Gasparo and the crew of Comic Book Yeti, and John Klein III of Shadowflame with Magic. Most importantly, I'd like to thank all of our listeners and supporters. Be good to each other out there and take care of your people. We'll see you next time.