Dungeon Meshi
Author: 九井 諒子
Page count: 191
Natively: 29
Summary
When adventurer Laois and his party are wiped out by a dragon in the depths, they lose everything - including a party member! Without their gear and coin, they must return and defeat the dragon before his sister is digested - but if they continue like this, they’re sure to starve along the way. Laois decides there’s only one thing to do: eat the monsters! Slimes, basilisks, mimics and dragon: is there anything these gourmand adventurers won’t chow down on?
Availability
Personal Opinion
I love Dungeon Meshi and hold it as one of my favourite manga; despite seeming like a gimmick manga, it’s a perfectly realised exercise in worldbuilding and storytelling, with incredibly solid, delicious-looking and clear art alongside writing that veers wildly between hilarious and morbid often in the same breath.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Gorgeous art and well thought-out worldbuilding
- Funny, touching, and darkly morbid all at the same time
- Studio Trigger anime currently airing on Netflix which really helps understanding
- To promote the anime seems like a lot of sales going on at the moment across some of the stores
- Actually complete story at 14 vols (+a guidebook and an artbook with omakes, but who’s counting)
Cons
- No furigana and very wordy across three different domains (fantasy, cooking, and biology)
- I think the first volume only really begins to hint at the complexity of the storytelling, would probably take until vol 4 to really kick in
- so ridiculously popular everybody keeps dropping spoiler fanart on twitter
Pictures
Screenies from my bookwalker (if it lets me…)
