Sunny is the story about the foster children of the Star Kids home, a combination group home/orphanage facility. They struggle with both the everyday issues of growing up and those specific of being abandoned or orphaned children. Their only way out from their situation is the Sunny, a dilapidated old car in the front lawn of the home. The Sunny is used by the children to go magically wherever they want, travel the world, go into space, or just find a refuge from the troubles of reality.
Publication
Sunny is written and illustrated by Taiyō Matsumoto. It was serialized in Monthly Ikki by Shogakukan from December 25, 2010 to September 25, 2014, when Ikki suspended its publication. The manga was later transferred to Monthly Big Comic Spirits on January 27, 2015. Sunny ended on July 27, 2015. The manga has been collected into six tankōbon volumes published by Shogakukan between August 30, 2011 and October 30, 2015. The manga has been licensed for English-language release by Viz Media in 2012, with the first volume being published on May 21, 2013.
Volume list
Reception
The first volume of Sunny was chosen as one of the Great Graphic Novels 2014 in the fiction section by the Young Adult Library Services Association. It won the award for Best Graphic Novel at the 2nd Cartoonist Studio Prize. It was nominated for Best American Edition of Foreign Material at the 2014 Harvey Awards. In 2016, the manga won the 61st Shogakukan Manga Award in the General category, sharing it with Umimachi Diary. It was also picked as a nominee for 'Best Comic' in the 42nd and the 44th annual Angoulême International Comics Festival held in 2015 and 2017 respectively. On Anime News Network, Rebecca Silverman gave volume 1 an overall grade of B+. Greg McElhatton of Comic Book Resources praised the art and claimed it was "the most accessible Matsumoto manga to date" in his review of the first volume. Publishers Weekly wrote that the author "deftly weaves a sense of longing and sadness into even the most chaotic scenes, and readers are drawn into the lives of children struggling to be themselves in a world that doesn’t want them."
