Review by Ian Keogh

Gordon Goliath runs a fast food truck, and driving through the desert one day on the way to an oasis he almost runs over a naked girl in a sleeping bag. The next day he’s stopped by military types with heavy guns who want to search his truck. Neither the girl, who we learned is named Arisa, nor Gordon and his food truck are without resources, and it turns out he’s also on the run from the military.

It’s a daft, but entertaining premise, and Rokurou Ogaki wastes no time throwing us into the middle of it. There’s no immediate explanation for the military, flying fish in the desert or Arisa’s preference for being naked as Ogaki runs through Gordon’s day to to day life. He scavengers what food he can, then adapts his recipes to what he’s found or caught, and it becomes clear that this is a wrecked planet where the tough rule the roost.

Crazy Food Truck is like Tank Girl for the 2020s. Ogaki doesn’t have a great attention span, so it’s episodic, we’re never far away from Arisa pulling her top off or the next fight, and it’s all joyfully energetic. There’s a thin connecting thread of the military’s continuing search for both Arisa and Gordon, but that comes to little here until the final pages, meaning it’s more relevant in Crazy Food Truck 2.

The exception is Ogaki being serious about his food, to the extent of providing recipes in the back. He feeds in strange hybrid creatures like puffer cows, but the recipes seem adaptable. Also endearing is Ogaki being a rare manga creator who credits his artistic staff, so Kaku Ninomiya, Tatsuya Hainoki and Sei Fukui are responsible for some of the art.

This doesn’t pretend to be anything more than mindless fun, and succeeds very well on that basis.