One Great Panel: DandaDan

Who you gonna call? Sakata.

If you’re not fully consumed by the DandaDan hype train, take it from me—you need to be. I’m trying to veer out of the mainstream on MangaCraft, just to diversify the series I’m writing about, but I keep coming back to DandaDan because, despite being “mainstream” at this point, DandaDan continues to break barriers, create new ridiculousness, and stay so fresh. Like, certifiably fresh.

As I talked about in my last DandaDan post, the key is character, and how well they introduce characters to a story already saturated with personality. But among all those characters, no one ever overstays their welcome.

So let’s talk about today’s one great panel. This is from Chapter 114, page 20.

Context: The gang is in trouble, Momo, Vamola, Aira and Okarun are pretty much screwed against an army of overpowered aliens. They left a note for help, expecting for Momo’s grandma to get it and come, but instead, this masked biker shows up as reinforcements, and it turns out to be Kinta Sakata, who, by his own admission, is rather limited in what he can actually do.

This is a bit different than my usual One Great Panels, because artistically, it’s not like this panel is gawk-inducing. It looks pretty standard. But that’s not a strike against it. The focus instead is on character, context, comedy, and cliffhanger, all of which begin with a ‘c’ and that’s pretty neat.

In this singular panel, we are being thrown for a loop, because Sakata’s confidence is unfounded, he is not the savior his friends called for, nor the savior they wanted, and they let him know that right from the off. And yet Sakata does do his part to save the day, even if we don’t know that yet. The thing with Sakata’s character, and by extension, with DandaDan in general, is sometimes they play it straightforward, and sometimes they veer so far off the expected path that it’s impossible to predict how these cliffhanger moments will play out.

All we know in this moment is that Sakata, the goober of all goobers, is here to save the day. The thrill is in the unexpected. In not knowing what part Sakata has to play in any of this (or any adventure ever, such is the nature of his character). And also in the hilarity of him trying to act like he is in fact, the savior they called for. But he does more or less serve that role. It’s layer upon layer of unexpectedness, rolled in hilarity, rolled in a cliffhanger. A cliffhanger that’s comedy and tension rolled into one.

But wait, there’s more! And this goes outside the context of this one particular panel, but before this, we don’t know who’s on that motorcycle. It’s a serious “Who’s That Guy?” moment (that’s a Grease 2 reference, forgive me). So as readers, we don’t know who that is until this moment, right at the end of the chapter.

See how much is being rolled together in this panel? Like an Uzumaki spiral.