Ashimeshi

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Ashi Meshi, short for “Is being an assistant enough to feed yourself ?” is a collection of strips Riichi Kasai published on her blog while she worked as an assistant and reveal some of the inside informations of her job as well as tell some anecdotes or funny stories that happened in her daily life. Each section is pretty small, only 1 to 3 pages and each volume is about 130 pages long.

Her drawings are very simple as expected, but god knows how simplicity can be effective and charming for these type of stories, but even when compared to other blogs and chibi artstyles, ... it’s rather the short end of the stick, her style is not distinctive at all and she doesn’t know how to organize the content of her frames which makes a lot of the jokes fail to hit the mark.

To be fair with it and to talk a bit about the actual content, it does gives insight into a job that’s most of the time overlooked and manage to go to the essential when it wants to, has interesting technical details about the technical work they have to do, their salary, the specific clothes they have to wear, how she had to handle the personality of the different authors she worked with, the different instructions she was given, the pressure of the delays and how her family perceived this job…

It’s not the case for the majority of this work though, a lot of it is just repetitive and the format of the books, now that it’s not on a blog anymore, doesn’t help its case, being organized by theme makes it laborious to read through. There’s also the third volume which was completely uninteresting and boring as it didn’t focus anymore on her job as an assistant but is completely about her going around libraries to sell this manga which was picked up by a publisher, obsessing over her newfound popularity and making lots of lousy jokes in between.

Too bad that it did not exploit fully its idea because there’s some knowledge that’s nice to learn here, it’s not a manga I would recommend unfortunately (it’s not translated anyway and only available in French)