Gyagu Manga Biyori

Gyagu Manga Biyori is a short anime based off of the 4-panel manga by the same name. 

    The series has no coherent plot, no main characters or overall theme aside from scatterbrained comedy and satire. The mini plot lines range from a story about a marketing firm being chewed out by their boss in regards to the quality of the sticker campaign to promote an anime through bread, a morning talk show dealing with the end of the world and a girl who convinces death to give her a chance to die after saying a great one-liner. The animation is juvenile and unpolished. The audio editing is also unpolished and the music is plain bizarre. Each episode is under 5 minutes with a short opening theme a shorter closing theme. The humor is low brow and relies on puns absurdities and pratfalls.

    For all its worth Gag Manga is incredibly entertaining, if you understand the obscure and culturally based jokes. The cheap production for the series adds to its flavor and comedy. The show is best compared to a collection of fast paces Saturday Night Live sketches that are many times funnier then that show has been able to pull off in many years. This show is for a very select audience outside of Japan though. 4-panel comedic manga are prolific and well received in Japan, but the form is rare and vastly unknown outside of the country. Gag Manga is made for the Japanese and the Japanese only. They make no qualms to try and reach a wider audience and almost everything in the series requires the viewer to be accustomed to Japanese pop culture. If you have a penchant for the bizarre, are a fan of 4-panel manga and/or have a good grasp in the way the entertainment industry works in Japan Gyagu Manga Biyori might just be a series for you to enjoy. While some of the sketches can be grating, they pass by quickly. In just over an hour of total running time for the first season and a similar run time for the second season you will not waste a lot of time viewing this series. However, this is a very hard title to come across. It is in no way licensed outside of Japan, nor is the manga readily available outside of Japan as well. I would be incredibly shocked if this series was every brought to foreign audiences in a commercial manner.

UPDATE: As expected, the series has never seen the light of day outside of Japan.