The Spring 2024 Manga Guide

Bungo Stray Dogs: The Official Comic Anthology

What's It About? 

Presenting the first anthology of the popular supernatural action series Bungō Stray Dogs! Featuring a luxurious list of guest authors, these new Bungo stories feature everything from gags to heartwarming moments in a charming collection that will leave you begging for more!

Bungo Stray Dogs: The Official Comic Anthology has a story by Kafka Asagiri and character design by Sango Harukawa, with English translation by Kevin Gifford. Bianca Pistillo lettered this volume. To be published by Yen Press on May 21, 2024.

Is It Worth Reading?

These “official comic anthologies” are very hit-or-miss. Bungō Stray Dogs' version is somewhere in the middle of the pack – no one takes any risks with the stories or artwork, the plots are all comfortably shallow, and the majority of the stories focus on the Armed Detective Agency, with a few Mafia tales and one Guild story to round things out. Most of the pieces also focus on Atsushi, Kiyoka, and Dazai, even if the creators say in their afterwords that their favorite characters are other people; only the Guild short story's creator decided to write about their personal favorite, Edgar Allen Poe. (And Karl the raccoon, of course.) The result is a real similarity between all the pieces, and while they're fun, they simply don't take enough risks.

The aforementioned Poe story goes the farthest on that front. The plot is that Karl gets jealous of his master's obsession with Ranpo and decides to run away, leaving a confused and sad Poe to try to figure out what's going on with his raccoon pal. Along the way, he's offered help from Lovecraft and Steinbeck, which he decides would cause more problems of a raccoon-mangling nature. While this story acknowledges the franchise's major events, it also happily pushes them to the background so that the creator can indulge in as much Poe goodness as possible.

We see similar trends in the stories that focus on Kenji and Kiyoka. The Kenji stories are mostly caught up in his good-natured naivete and feel much more self-indulgent than most other stories. Still fun, but looking to play with the fact that, as of 2016, he hadn't been given much character development. Kiyoka's pieces have fun with the fact that she's been living anything but a normal life since her parents's deaths, having the other, more (nominally) well-adjusted characters attempt to bring her out of her shell, mostly in the clothing department. Everyone wants to draw her in Western outfits because that's a major unifying theme.

This is cute if you're a Bungō Stray Dogs fan. It's not necessarily anything more than that, and it's not a must-read unless you're a completist, and if you don't find Dazai's suicide “jokes” funny, it might be better to skip this because there are a lot of them. Still, it's cute enough to be entertaining, and while I may forget it soon after reading it, I'm also not sorry that I picked it up.