Dr.スランプ
An eccentric inventor builds a super-strong robot girl in a village full of talking animals and aliens, in Akira Toriyama's first hit. Filed under 4, the structure.
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4The letters of this title total 31, a 4 — the number of structure, labour, and the building of lasting systems.
Akira Toriyama's Dr. Slump ran in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1980 to 1984 and was collected in 18 volumes. In Penguin Village, the inventor Senbei Norimaki builds Arale, a robot girl who looks like a small child, needs glasses and can split the Earth with a punch. She has no idea she is not human, and the village has no idea what to do about her.
It is a gag manga of pure invention. Penguin Village is home to talking animals, a policeman with a pistol fixation, aliens, a sun with a face and characters who break the fourth wall freely. Toriyama's clean, rounded drawing and his designs for vehicles and gadgets were already distinctive.
Toriyama's editor, Kazuhiko Torishima, pushed him hard, rejecting draft after draft, and appears in the series as the villain Dr. Mashirito. Their partnership continued into Dragon Ball.
It won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 1981, became a hugely popular anime, and made Toriyama a star before Dragon Ball. Arale's catchphrases and the village's look shaped Japanese children's culture in the early 1980s.
Set against the Pythagorean table, the title totals 31. Reduced, that is 4. The weight sits in “Slump”, which carries 18 on its own and reduces to 9.
The reference files it as a structure. The number's contribution is structure, labour, and the building of lasting systems — and with it the 4's insistence that what lasts must be built patiently, which is the thread the reference follows here.
Beneath the 4 sit two smaller figures: 3 in the vowels, 1 in the consonants. Expression underneath, initiative on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
総画 strokes is 8, volumes is 18, a 9, years serialised is 5 and debut year is 1980, a 9 — none of which lands on the 4 the title gives. That disagreement is worth more than an agreement would be: it marks the gap between what a work is called and what it is.
Read on the 4's terms, this entry asks you to look for the constraint the subject was working inside. The 4 confuses the frame for the work. Structures outlive their usefulness, and several entries here describe conventions kept long past their reason. The other entries that reduce to 4 are collected on The Structure.