Gente Volume 1 Review

By Jason Glick 1 year, 5 months ago

Viva Italia!

When the good people who oversee Viz’s Signature line find an author that they like, you can be assured that said author will get the exposure they deserve. Case in point: Natsume Ono. Prior to this year, Ono had none of her works available in English. By the end of the year, she’ll have had four. With a full-court-press of releases like this you’d think that she’d be a talent to rival those of fellow Viz Sig labelmates Naoki Urasawa and Fumi Yoshinaga. Is she? Well… kinda.

Viz Sig’s first release, Not Simple, was a polarizing tale of one man’s misfortunes in life that showed she had real balls as a storyteller by beginning the story with its ending. I found it to be hypnotic in its melancholy, but others just found it depressing. The next release, Ristorante Paradiso, was enjoyable fluff about a girl who travels to Italy with the intention of ruining her mother’s marriage, but finds true love instead. Her latest release, “Gente” is a continuation of the latter title, focusing on its supporting cast. I was looking forward to this since I felt that the “Ristorante” crew could do with some development. As it turns out, there’s really not much to these people.

The series begins with the tale of how Lorenzo, the owner of the titular Ristorante Paradiso, got the place up and running and staffed it with older, bespectacled gentlemen for the pleasure of his wife Olga. Then we’re introduced to one of the waiters, Luciano, and get an inside look at his family and personal life. A couple undergoing some turmoil in their relationship is the subject of the next chapter and we get to see how their efforts to work out their issues intersect with the Ristorante’s staff. Vito, another waiter, gets involved with a woman at a gym and is drawn into the domestic troubles surrounding her sister before the entire cast comes together in the final chapter for a lunch at Lorenzo’s house.

I want to say that the simple setups of these stories have hidden depths, but that’s just not true. These wisps of stories are character studies that have no real character to them. None of the characters change, and we’re left with no real understanding of how characters like Vito and Lorenzo wind up in the situations they do or why they respond the way they did. The couple does reconcile, but that struck me as more of a contrivance dictated by genre conventions. I wasn’t expecting this series to have an overarching plot that would drive these character studies, but after reading this I came to appreciate how the predictable romantic comedy hijinks gave some momentum and direction to the story of Ristorante Paradiso.

It’s not an entire loss as Ono shows that she does have some impressive artistic chops in this volume. She does a great job of capturing the scenic feel of the nameless Italian city the story takes place in, and it almost makes you feel that you’re there while you’re reading it. Ono is equally skilled at depicting her cast in their various emotional states and she generally has a good eye for how facial expressions and body language can reveal a character’s state of mind. With that said, even her skills are not enough to make these people seem like more than stock character types in these stories.

Gente isn’t an outright awful series, just dull and a little disappointing given my expectations prior to reading it. Ono clearly has talent as a storyteller, but the stories here struck me as if she was indulging her love of Italy and older, bespectacled gentlemen more than anything else. The next series of hers that Viz Sig will be releasing is a samurai tale called House of Five Leaves. Its change of time, place and subject matter makes me interested, but I think I’ll be reading it online first before deciding whether or not to pick up the dead tree edition.

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