Aho-Girl #4

Volume 4 of Hiroyuki's delightfully chaotic comedy finds the cast in wonderfully anarchic form — the cover shows a cheerful brown-haired girl and her laughing companion piled atop a bounding white dog, joined by two kids armed with a handheld console, a bucket, and a baseball, while snacks, a butterfly net, a toy monster, a soccer ball, and a dragonfly scatter in every direction. The series' premise is right there in the cover's cheeky dictionary entry: aho-girl — Japanese, noun, "a clueless girl" — and Hiroyuki captures that spirit with infectious energy and a cast that clearly never runs out of bad ideas. If you're in the mood for high-energy slice-of-life comedy with a big, lovable dog at the center of the mayhem, this $12.99 volume from Kodansha USA is a very good time.