Gudetama: Love for the Lazy by Wook-Jin Clark

This is so cute. I first got into Gudetama after watching Vox's YouTube video, How a melancholy egg yolk conquered Japan. Here in the U.S., we only really have one kind of cute: the kind that conjures up images of big-eyed, childish innocence, but Japan's different kinds of cute are more textured, with dark or even sad nuances that our kind doesn't have.

Gudetama is a cranky, cantankerous egg yolk that just wants to be lazy. Sometimes he's melancholy, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes fatalistic, sometimes nihilistic, but no matter which way you look at him, that thicc ol' yolk is pretty darn adorbs.

In this graphic novel, Gudetama helps the lovelorn who are frustrated with their dating app. In each chapter, there's a new character suffering from a real or imaginary problem, and Gudetama "helps" them with mixed success at the urging of a rather terrifying, human-sized egg yolk ballerina sidekick.

I wouldn't go into this expecting anything cerebral, but I loved the art work and there were even some good messages in here buried under all that silly laziness. If you're into cute graphic-novels with great ark, GUDETAMA: LOVE FOR THE LAZY is a good buy.

Thanks to Netgalley/the publisher for the review copy!

3.5 to 4 out of 5 stars