I have been reading more manga than ever before. I have been reading a lot of first volumes to try and figure out which series I want to continue reading. I spotted the first volume of Crazy Food Truck at a bookstore in Winnipeg. I thought the concept was interesting. It felt like a Mad Max adventure except it featured a food truck. I finished reading Crazy Food Truck and I felt let down as this volume plays into some of the notable tropes in anime and manga. Crazy Food Truck shows how often female characters are sexualized in manga.

Crazy Food Truck begins with Gordon, a man trying to survive in this dystopian society. He’s driving through the desert looking for his next customers to serve and to make ends meet. He finds Arisa, a young, naked woman in the middle of the road. He takes Arisa in and gives her clothing and shelter. Immediately upon rescuing Arisa, Gordon is chased by Arisa’s captors as they will do anything to get her back. Gordon and Arisa quickly bond and go off on several adventures throughout the volume.

As mentioned previously, I liked the concept of this. I think there is enough intrigue and unanswered questions that make this series interesting. Gordon has a secretive past, potentially involving the military? Some people are after Arisa, so why was Arisa captured in the first place? I can see why someone would continue on in the series as I’d be curious to see how the series unfolds.

This leads me to my biggest gripe with this series which is the sexualization of Arisa. Arisa is introduced as a naked woman in the middle of the desert. I don’t have a problem with nudity and I didn’t care that Arisa was introduced that way, it’s in the blurb on the back of the book. With that being said, Arisa ended up being nude often. After being rescued, she complains about being hot and takes off her shirt. There’s another moment where she’s shown showering naked. If that wasn’t enough, Arisa takes her top off in the middle of a fight sequence. It felt like it was too much in such a short book. Why do we have to portray female characters this way? If you take the things that Arisa does and replicate them with a male character, it would come off as being ridiculous, yet we do this with female characters all the time.

If that wasn’t enough, I was reading reviews and some mentioned how creepy it was that Arisa was underage while Gordon was way older. ICK. When I read this manga originally, I was picturing Arisa as being an adult, so I might have missed the fact that she’s underage. If that’s the case, this makes this manga even worse.

I think another thing to add to this is that Arisa has no personality. She meets Gordon, eats a bunch of food, and that’s about all I know about her. It would be interesting to hear more of Arisa’s back story. Does she have a family? What are her hobbies? How did she learn how to defend herself? I think if there was more revealed about her, I probably would have cared more about her as a character. The sexualization of her character would have still bothered me, but it would have made the difference between continuing in this series vs. abandoning it altogether.

Crazy Food Truck was a miss, but I’m still planning on reading other manga series in the future.