Sleeper day continues with Delusional Monthly Magazine, an original from the director of Gintama, Miyawaki Chizuru. This is produced at OLM, but she and much of the staff and cast are carryovers from Diomedea’s Binan Koukou Chikyuu Bouei-bu Love!, which I modestly enjoyed and which became a pretty successful franchise. I had a vibe this one could be pretty good (thus the sleeper tag, duh) so fair to say my expectations were relatively high going into the premiere.
On reflection, I’d say Gekkan Mousou Kagaku was just sort of okay. It looked cheap, but you expect that from this sort of show and I’ll take this cheap over cheap CGI any day of the week. The bigger issue is that the humor just didn’t work all that well, and this series is 100% a farce so that’s pretty important. It’s the story of the titular paranormal magazine, which is run by a 28 year-old slacker named Tarou (though the boss is a glamorous woman played by Kugimiya Rie, who we barely see here – smoking a shisha). In truth the magazine is mostly Tarou hanging out in a kissaten, and his only staff seems to be a 12 year-old named Jirou and a dog named Saburou.
Jirou may be a magical boy – he certainly has the ability to lay on hands – and Saburou is clearly a sentient dog. Tarou’s supernatural ability appears to be the ability to see auras and curses – which he clearly can with Gorou, the “scientist” he literally runs into on the street. Gorou is trying to find a publisher for his gigantic treatise on the lost continent of Mo, which he’a apparently found and has a magical item to prove it. I don’t think the details really matter – it’s just a pretext for hijinks.
Hijinks are fine, but they have to be pretty funny if you’re going to build a whole series around them and these are more hit and miss. The major characters are basically fine (though Gorou is a bit much) but don’t come across as especially interesting or nuanced beyond their role in advancing the story. I’ll give Delusional Monthly Magazine another episode to see if the comedy finds its stride (it did take an ep or three to do so with Binan Koukou), but the expectations level is certainly a few notches lower.
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