Go Nagai is a well known legend in the anime and manga world who innovated the industry. A prolific artist, on one hand he created a lot of well known and beloved series such as Devilman, Cutie Honey, Mazinger Z etc. On the other hand, he created some despicable pieces of media.
Being a Go Nagai fan myself, most of the times I'm ok and more indulgent with his works, despite their lower scores. For example, Hanappe Bazooka (at least the first volume ;-;) and Kekko Kamen were pretty entertaining and funny in my opinion, but other works, like Dororon Enma-Kun are just... Ugh, a total miss.
Omorai-Kun is by far his biggest miss from what I've read so far, and it's going to be like that for a long time, I can actually say that it is also one of the worst comics of all time.
Released from 1971 to 1972, Omorai-Kun is a comedy manga with the worst comedy possible. To summarize it up, Go Nagai's Omorai-Kun centers around our protagonist, a kid beggar named Omorai, and his beggar friends, the young lady Okomo, the elder of the group Kojiji and other minor characters, in their silly misadventures. It's an episodic series, and each of the chapters' conflict starts because of Omorai's execrable hygienic conditions.
Being a gag manga, it doesn't focus itself on the plot or in the development of the characters, its focus is, obviously, in the pure comedic aspect. You want a good comedy? Then you picked the wrong comic, because Omorai-Kun is simply disgusting and unbearable.
Personally, I've never been fan of gross humour, I rarely see myself actually laughing at this kind of stuff, but this manga is in a whole 'nother level of disgusting, and I say this as someone who read some of Shintaro Kago's works.
The gross out humor ranges from fart jokes, body fluid jokes, jokes about mud, trash and other dirty stuff, to highkey scat jokes, eating feces and drinking pee jokes and genitalia jokes. It gets worse and worse, and by the end of the series you'll be exhausted.
We have a lot of dubious content: we have the same jokes about how dirty Omorai is, so dirty in fact that he can canonically poison people by touching them, he can darken easily the water, the snow or a perfectly clean white towel in a few seconds, he has an entire dirt armour around his body where RADIOACTIVE ANTS live, the dirt easily melts on his face when it's hot outside, he leaves entire hectometers of dandruff whenever he takes his hat off, he can easily catch fire by friction because on his body exists some kind of inflamable fat substance????? You got my point.
Omorai, like literally any beggar from this manga, has a strong passion for literally anything dirty and disgusting, there is no exception. He resolves all of his problems by using his snot, excrements, body fluids, dirt, trash, there are no hygienic options for him. For example, one time he created an entire functionable flute out of his body dirt, which was took by accident by his music teacher and the teacher suffered afterwards. An another example, he wanted to extinguish the flames of a burning school with his boogers and piss, just to kill the fireman who wanted to save him by accidentaly throwing his feces on the man, making him fall from the window.
Can we talk about the body count of Omorai? He's basically an indirect serial killer, if this makes sense. Like in almost every chapter of this comic, someone has to suffer, even die, and this kid still lives his life with the widest smile imaginable.
To continue with more disgusting stuff, there is an entire monologue of Omorai talking about loving your own excrements. All I can say is B R U H
You want to know the scenes that made me lose my mind? I can start with a simple idiotic joke of the beggars of giving excrements and pee to a drunken civilian to eat and drink.
What about that time when a girl threw some sew buttons with such precision that they landed on Omorai's anus more than one time, and, yes, there are many close-ups of that place. Ew, ew, ew, I hate this.
You want to understand how bad this manga actually is?
Even the author himself confessed through the pages of the last chapters that he got grossed out by his work. He doesn't think either that his manga is funny, but just disgusting, and I find this absolutely hilarious.
I quote:
"Eww. As the author, I am always unintentionally making my stomach feel sick... Haa haa haa."
"It's not funny. It's disgusting"
Reading the manga, we learn that there exists something called "the Way of the beggar", which is some kind of philosophy about the joy of living this kind of life. It practically romanticizes the dirty, unhygienic way of living in the streets, like eating cockroaches onigiris when you have the chance to consume actually eatable things, or loving the smell of trash cans, sewers and so on.
I know that this is a gag manga and you don't really need to take its content seriously, but I still find this aspect quite bizarre and childish.
I can also talk about the language used in the manga, specifically how poor is the language of the beggars. It's for sure written that way to be more comedic, but it's more troublesome than it should have been, especially for people who don't speak really well english. It was hard for me as well to read in the first few chapters, and even after I started to read it easily, the manga still remained unfunny. Haha they say the word "come" as *insert a stock image of a glass filled with milk* , funniest thing ever.
Being a comic translated 4 years ago, you'll find some not so great, edgier words, like the r word for example.
To be honest, I had 2 or 3 times when some phrases caught me off guard and i chuckled a bit, but those times don't compare at all with the rest of the manga.
Art wise, there is nothing to complain about. It's your typical 70s cartoony Go Nagai style which fits with the overall comedic theme. As expected from a Nagai work, at times you can find some drawings with more effort put into them.
Overall,
I don't recommend this manga even if you're a fan of Nagai's works. It's straight up repulsive, gross and unfunny. I hated this manga when I first started reading it 4-5 years ago, I hate it now when I picked it up to finish it.
In my opinion, Omorai-Kun can be easily considered one of the worst manga series ever made.
