Paparinko Monogatari

OK, this is the hidden treasure on this site. If you’ve found this, it’s likely you know what this is, but if not, here’s the deal:

In 1985, Hisashi Eguchi started a manga series called “Paparinko Monogatari”, about a 14 year old girl named Rinko and her father, 30 year old Saburo, who suddenly has this girl show up to live with him and cramp his style. It’s a gag strip par excellence, with Some of Eguchi’s most stylish drawing to date at that point in his life. It was very popular, and Mister Donut sold merch for a while. Pins, tumblers, and even a T shirt. What happened, though, was that Big Comic Spirits, the biweekly anthology it ran in, went weekly. Eguchi couldn’t work fast enough, and the series was abandoned as a result in early 1986. It has never been released in Tankoubon format, and is basically considered to be lost media at this point. I mean, who the hell has all those disposable comic volumes from 40 years ago?

Motherfucker, *I DO*.

I spent several years on the hunt, and acquired every single volume, and at a pretty dear price. Immediately after having completed the collection (including the unknown in the west 1989 “return” chapter), I discovered that fans in Japan had produced a bootleg Tankoubon reprinting all of it. And it was like 1/10th of what I paid.

God damn it.

No matter! I thoroughly enjoyed the 5 ish years I spent tracking it all down. And here it is. I may (and should, frankly) release this to the world at large by uploading it all to the manga sites, but for the time being, I’ll enjoy the fact that this impossible to find, obscure, and yet somehow infamous and clamored for manga is available in its entirety here. In a place even more obscure. This is my little gift to the Anime/Manga fandom in general and Eguchi fans in particular. If just one person who longed to read this beautifully rendered collection of cheap gags as much as I did finds this page, I’ll be satisfied.