Monday, October 16, 2023

A Post-Apocalyptic Dining Experience

Close, will the judges accept the answer?

Crazy Food Truck volume 1 lays out the core of the series in short order. You've got Gordon, a middle-aged guy who runs a food truck in what seems to be an endless desert. He meets Arisa when he nearly runs over her sleeping in the middle of the road. Arisa eats a lot, doesn't like wearing clothes, and doesn't seem to know hardly anything about the world.

Oh, and she's inhumanly fast and strong. On a related note, the military is after her.

With that established in the first 50 pages, writer/artist Rokurou Ogaki spends most of the remaining pages fleshing out Gordon's day-to-day life and how Arisa complicates that. Her appetite causes her to eat everything in the fridge, so Gordon has to go looking for supplies. Which is both an opportunity to highlight Arisa's unusual abilities, and how this particular world works, as Gordon goes hunting for rockskin sand squid, squid that live beneath the sand in places where there used to be ocean.

Don't ask me how that works.

After that, we learn there are actual towns, but they're vulnerable to unscrupulous elements. Like military deserters. Gordon and Arisa help liberate the town, Gordon claiming he just wanted the brewery running again so he could get some beer and sell some burgers. Arisa's just drunk.

The volume concludes with a squad of soldiers, led by an old acquaintance of Gordon's, catching up with the two of them in a restaurant. Gordon refuses to hand Arisa over, although again he downplays his motives by claiming she owes him for a lot of food she ate. The acquaintance claimed to have the entire town staked out, so the escape will continue into the second volume.

Ogaki loves drawing the different things Gordon cooks in great detail. I don't know how feasible some of the recipes are - can you make burgers from fried squid? - but it helps make Gordon's love for cooking seem real, as a show of how much effort he puts into his cooking and the presentation of it.

Arisa's ignorance of basically everything allows Ogaki a path for exposition. Gordon explains the facts of the setting - like the stuff about the squids - to us via explaining it to her. It gets a little annoying when Arisa's acting like she thinks a fishing lure is food, but it's at least consistent. Even though she's described as being 17, Ogaki writes her like she's a 3-year-old, so I guess the "17" part is meant physically.

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