Penguin Gentlemen Will Teach You EVERYTHING You Want to Know About Penguins
- WRITER
- Kishi Ueno
- Artist
- Kishi Ueno
- Letterer
- Bianca Pistillo
- Publisher
- Yen Press
- Price
- 18.00
- Release Date
- 2021-03-09
Penguin Gentlemen, a single-volume manga by Kishi Ueno, is one of the stranger "edutainment" manga to be translated into English. The likes of Cells at Work and Dr. Stone have ongoing narratives to deliver their scientific concepts; even something more episodic like Heaven's Design Team has a clear formula it follows in every chapter. Penguin Gentlemen, however, is pretty much plotless. This is a book to read if you want to learn about penguins or enjoy ridiculous humor with muscular gentlemen; it does not attempt to deliver anything more or less than that.
Theoretically, Penguin Gentlemen's premise is that some penguins have somehow disguised themselves as muscular humans and work at The Watering Hole, a bar in "a country similar to Japan." From that description, you might expect some fish-out-of-water slice-of-life plotlines, but life among humans and working at The Watering Hole become mostly irrelevant after the prologue. The vast majority of the book consists of the penguins telling you facts about themselves, accompanied by gags.
You will learn a lot about penguins from reading Penguin Gentlemen. This manga will teach you how to identify all 18 species of penguin and offers in-depth information on the biology and behavior of The Watering Hole's six anthropomorphized species (King, Emperor, Adélie, Gentoo, Chinstrap and African).
Ueno, who identifies as "a water flea that wants to be a penguin in their next life," clearly loves these adorable, unusually-evolved, sometimes-aggressive creatures. From how they eat to how they attract mates, so much about penguins is so inherently comical that the gags pretty much write themselves even before you add the anthropomorphization gimmicks.
Yen Press has gone all-out on the printing of Penguin Gentlemen. Not only is the volume presented in a fancy hardcover, but almost the entire first chapter is printed in color. Ueno's art benefits a lot from color; they've been making full-color artwork of these penguin characters since long before they started writing this manga, and the full shading is a massive aspect of their style's appeal. The black and white art makes the human faces a bit more uncanny valley in an Aeon Flux-ish sort of way -- not bad art, but less attractive (the penguins are cute however they're drawn).
Penguin Gentleman is one of those books that delivers on a highly specific experience. If "Hetalia but with penguins instead of politics and bara dudes instead of BL twinks" is a pitch that sounds entertaining to you, then you'll come away both amused and educated.
Kishi Ueno’s Penguin Gentlemen is available in English from Yen Press.