Kiniro Mosaic

I might be the only person in the world who feels strongly that the manga of Kiniro Mosaic is better than the anime, but it is. It's also a great comic overall. It's a lot punchier than most of it's Kirara peers, especially in the later volumes; the character-based jokes come a lot more naturally and those characters not burdened with being one-note gimmicks or overplayed archetypes. They feel like real, well realized comic characters, which is great for a strip like this! Reminds me, weirdly, of my beloved Get Fuzzy-- a comparison that I also think no one has ever made, mostly since everyonewho likes Get Fuzzy assumes that no one else knows what it is, and thus never talks about it, despite probably having more avowed fans than most other American comic strips... But that's neither here nor there, as they say... Anyway, the pacing of the jokes is mostly lost in the anime. It also feels somehow toned down, both in the humor (they are missing a lot of the best jokes) and in the visuals-- Yui Hara draws very dense but clean panels, and the somewhat vacant direction and bland scoring of the anime doesn't capture that at all. Along with ruining most of the fun bilingual jokes, of course, which are infinitely better written on a page, and work leagues better in translation than one would expect, helped by the great translation notes each volume has. (Also: Karen Kujo, as popular as she is for among anime viewers for some reason, is so much better with her broken Japanese actually translated as broken English. She's nothing in the anime! A worm! And Honoka doesn't even get her ball!)