Guyabano Holiday
Read the latest available in English by panpanya, Guyabano Holiday, which like the earlier An Invitation from a Crab is mostly daydream-logic vignettes in which simply-drawn characters drift through richly detailed urban scenes. It sometimes feels a little pointless to try to summarize vibe-oriented work like this, and it probably falls into the category of, you'll know right away whether you'd be into it. But a TCJ article once said that "panpanya's comics ... intuit low-key mythologies to enliven simple quirks of observation," and I guess that's basically right.
Ultimately a lot of these comics are about what it feels like to remember familiar things imperfectly, and thus to occupy the present point at the end of a half-remembered, partially reconstructed personal history. The title story is a fictionalized travel diary, but even it spends a lot of time on familiar things in an unfamiliar place. From the author commentary:
I have a habit of imagining myself walking around my neighborhood as I go to sleep. But I realize when I look around my actual neighborhood there are at least a few discrepancies from my mental image of it. ... It lets me feel strangely out of place despite knowing the scene well. The more precisely I try to imagine what's there, the stronger that feeling of difference, which I find interesting.
Concern for encyclopedic accuracy is superseded by fascination with fuzzy experience. This is reinforced by objects rendered in hatching with no outline and panels with backgrounds partly cut from photos and partly drawn, among other playful formal maneuvers that you should see for yourself. These comics are also funny in an understated way, or at least not shy about the goofiness inherent in chasing down answers to idle questions in usually the least efficient ways possible. They'd go well with coffee or lunch, not just because they're relatively light content-wise, but also because sometimes you need a quick midday reminder of what it's like to be a person.