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Macaroni Switch, vol. 1, Daichi Kawada. Grade: A
There's not a lot of information on Kadawa in English right now. He does have a Facebook page, which has lots of character sketches. Macaroni Switch started in 2014, and he also wrote and drew a short piece for Harta Cover Stories (one-shots that appear at the beginning of each issue of Harta magazine). Switch is a collection of short nonsense gag chapters, 220 pages total, that all ran in Harta, vols. 17-29.
Kawada has a very clean, highly developed line style, and his characters, while manga-like, look very realistic. His backgrounds are very detailed, and he likes drawing parodies of other artists' works. His gags are on the order of Hideo Azuma and Tori Miki, but without Azuma's lolicon elements and Tori Miki's penchant for SF themes. Kawada's running gags in this volume range from a girl that looks cute only when she takes her glasses off, a salaryman that dresses up as a dog to get cute girls to pet him only to get angry at being patronized, and an anti-gravity zone that causes weird things to happen to anyone that enters it.
Kawada also occasionally channels Fujio Akatsuka (Tensai Bakabon), when he plays with the entire idea of panel artwork on paper. I especially like the story shown here.
Summary: Macaroni Switch is a collection of nonsense gags by Daiichi Kawada. Some of them are laugh-out-loud funny, others just make you tilt your head and go "hmmm." The artwork is good, and it's an easy read. Highly recommended if you like Azuma, Tori Miki and Akatsuka.
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