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Otasukebito Hashiru! manga review

Otasukebito Hashiru! (or: Help comes Running! おたすけ人走る!) is a shoujo sports manga from 1979, written and illustrated by Hikaru Yuzuki. Yuzuki is probably best known for Amai Seikatsu/Sweet Life, the barely worksafe long-running manga about a naive young man who goes to work for a lingerie company.

That is that and this is this. Otasukebito Hashiru is worth a read at best, but it’s not the kind of manga that really sticks in anyone’s memory. The story is simple: PR Academy is an ex-girls’ school on the verge of collapse. To save their skins and get more students, they decide to become famous for sports. But why start from scratch when you can recruit the best (and dumbest) sports students from across Japan? First, though, you have to put them through their paces… with a set of increasingly ridiculous tests.

It could have been good. And I suppose it really was considered funny back in 1979. Now, though, the gags are cheesy and stale and while the art is clean and the story is amusing, the manga suffers most of all from a thoroughly unlikeable cast. The main female, Kana has a short temper, a sadistic streak and a tendency to look down on those who don’t conform to her ideals.

On the other hand Sukesake Oda, the “hero” is a hero in name-only. He’s a lazy, perverted and uncooperative cheat, though those qualities don’t come out till later in the manga. The worst character of all, though, is Kana’s mother the principal, who is willing to do anything (and I mean anything) to see that her plan succeeds. Money comes before everything else, her own daughter included.

As a character manga, therefore, Otasukebito Hashiru! will leave you fuming at every turn. It’s quite amusing as a sports manga, though. Volume 1 ends with one of the most ridiculous ‘tennis’ matches I have ever witnessed, though for people who’ve read Prince of Tennis it will barely be a blip on their radar.

Still, I picked this up because it promised to have baseball in it. And it does, as the team strives to win the national Koshien tournament, the quickest and most reliable way for a school to become famous in Japan. That’s the good news. The bad news is, they only play baseball in volumes 2 and 3 so… yeah. If you want to find out whether they win or not, buy the Otasukebito Hashiru manga on Amazon (and ignore the wacky Google Translate titles).

My thoughts on: Hajime no Ippo

My favorite sports manga of all time. It’s number 17 on the list of best-selling manga for a reason i.e. it’s good. And it’s really, really long as well. It’s best read in huge chunks at a time, which is why I haven’t followed the weeklies in roughly 5 years, but I still consider it one of my favorites. Whenever someone on a forum or chatroom asks for a sports manga, a shounen manga or a long-runner, my first question is always “Have you read Hajime no Ippo?” Followed by “Go read Hajime no Ippo” if the answer is no.

Like most sports series, Hajime no Ippo also works excellently as an anime, though ideally you want to follow both the manga and anime for the best experience. The anime, especially the first season, is spot on in every way you can imagine. The voices are perfect for the characters, the soundtrack by Tsuneo Imahori is awesome and really gets you fired up and the action is tense, fluid, perfectly drawn, perfectly timed and perfectly animated. Although it’s unfortunate that Ippo didn’t do so well when it came to the west as Fighting Spirit, (and I bought all the DVDs too!) I’m sure anyone who picks it up will never regret it.

My top 5 reasons why Hajime no Ippo is so great

1. The characters are the best ever. The main character isn’t as annoying as other wimpy main characters tend to be and the supporting cast is one of the strongest in manga history. Even the match opponents are nicely fleshed out without going overboard. You’re bound to find someone you can root for, whether you like jokey comic characters, serious dignified ones or legit tough guys.

2. It is soooo funny! When he’s being funny, I think George Morikawa is probably one of the best comedy mangaka in the business today. Some of his sight gags are just so funny they have me rolling on the floor in stitches no matter how many times I read it. He’s great with silly puns as well and I still find myself saying “This isu naisu!” sometimes.

3. The women don’t take over the show. I’ve read too many series that got derailed by romantic hijinks to get happy when the main character of a shounen series falls in love. Some readers may find it frustrating that Ippo still hasn’t gotten together with Kumi after 1000 chapters, but I prefer that to this becoming some soppy love-soaked romance.

4. The action is great. Especially when you watch the anime, you can really feel the impact of every single punch. The boxers move (reasonably) convincingly like real boxers and adopt many of the same poses and actions. Some things might be a bit annoying for real boxing fans, e.g. Ippo’s terrible guarding skills, but everyone can enjoy the slightly over the top attacks which are crazy but juust subtle enough to be almost believable.

5. It’s a super long-runner. This may be a plus or minus depending on your point of view, but if you’re enjoying a series, the longer it lasts the better, right? The earliest 40 volumes or so are the high points of the series, but even now it’s still an excellent series with plenty of room left for growth for all the main characters. If you haven’t read the series before, now is a good time get in and enjoy a nice, long binge.

I think I’ll take my own advice and catch up on 5 years of missing Ippo action. Archive binge, here I come!

My thoughts on: Bleach

Continuing my series on the 20 best-selling manga of all time (the ones I’ve read anyway), this time we have Bleach by Kubo Tite. It’s been a while since I dropped it, but I remember it’s about a boy named Shirosaki Ichigo who accidentally (and we find out later, not so accidentally) gains the power of a Shinigami (soul reaper) and has to fight enemies named Hollows so he can save dead souls from being eaten by them.

As with most shounen stories, especially recently, Bleach starts out relatively simply with a standard Monster of the Week format and then rapidly spirals out of control. I picked up the Bleach anime very early in its run, then dropped it and switched to the manga when I’d watched all the episodes currently out. For a while it went well. I liked the simple story, the Hollows were suitably threatening without being too scary, I liked the personalities of Rukia, Ichigo and especially Kon. The battles were a little hard to follow but the art style was clean and nothing dragged on too long.

Then Soul Society happened. And that was okay, really. But it just went on for so, so long that I was ready to drop the manga by the end of it. I decided in to hang in there a little longer and what did I get for my troubles? Hueco Mundo. My anime-fu powers told me by that point that Ichigo & Co. were going to be in Hueco Mundo for a loooong, long time, so I decided to get out while the going was good. IIRC the last chapter I read featured Kenpachi fighting with one of the Hueco Mundo bad guys and the battle was like “I’m stronger than you!” “No, I’m stronger than you!” “No, I’m stronger than you!” Repeat for 10 chapters. In fact, repeat for 200 chapters and you have every battle in Bleach.

Of the Big Three Shonen Jump manga (One Piece, Naruto, Bleach), Bleach is the one I dropped the fastest. Which is a little sad because I introduced several people to the series and they absolutely loved it. So they’d keep coming up to me week after week with “Did you see X vs Y this week!?” and I’d be like nooo, I dropped Bleach ages ago and they wouldn’t believe me. Unfortunately they’ve all grown tired of Bleach as well now. They stuck it out through Hueco Mundo and through the Karakura Town arcs and then instead of the manga ending Kubo Tite apparently started a new arc. Which I hear isn’t half bad, but series fatigue has just set in for most people I know.

tl;dr Bleach is not a bad series at all for shonen fans, but you do need a lot of patience. If you haven’t started it yet, it might be best to wait for the whole thing to end and then read it all in one go.

Shiratama! chapter 2

Chapter 2 of Shiratama!, the seinen 4-koma manga about a high school girl who creates a baseball team on a whim after watching a game with her sister. This is one of those “seinen in name only” series. It’s only seinen because it ran in a magazine aimed at young men. The contents are therefore largely safe for work.

This chapter is mainly a character exploration, teaching us more about main character Tsubame, her sister, Leona and Mr. Suzuki. As I mentioned in my first post on Shiratama! most of the character traits established early on are established just for establishment’s sake and will rarely, if ever be brought up again. It’s not a very good manga, even by the low standards of 4-koma moe loli-type manga series.

Chapters 1 and 2 should be enough to give you a taste of what Shiratama! is about. If you really like it, buy it…? There are better sports series and better 4-komas out there though, so only buy it if you’ve run out of everything else.

Shiratama! manga review

A less than stellar baseball 4-koma manga about a girls’ baseball team. Shiratama! (しらたま!) is written and illustrated by Yuki Azumi, who I’ve never heard of before and never expect to hear of again. Frankly speaking if this manga hadn’t had a ‘loli’ protagonist and loli-like character art, it would never have been published. It still shouldn’t have been published anyway, but in the absence of a time machine all I can do is review what I’ve been given.

The art

Cutesy, but not too cutesy, loli but not too loli. The lines are clean and the action, what little there is, is simply laid out and easy to follow. Since the characters are supposed to be in high school, it feels silly to have them randomly flashing their panties and all the other things that count as ‘loli fanservce’ because they’re far too old to be behaving that way. But then again nobody ever reads 4-koma manga for their logic.

Shiratama 0011[Animefangirl.com] — Sample done by me. This manga is only available in Japanese.

Story

Tsubame Takatsu is a high school girl who isn’t very interested in baseball. One day she goes to watch a match with her sister and falls in love with the drama and excitement of the game. When she returns to school, she resolves to form her own baseball team. All that is chapter 1. The rest of Shiratama! covers her attempts to gather members, design uniforms, learn to play the game and finally have matches against… grade schoolers?

Is Shiratama! any good?

As a sports manga, not really. The team does play some games eventually, but the focus tends to be more on the novelty factor: *gasp* they’re girls! And they’re playing baseball! rather than on the actual sportiness of it. This is a common feature shared with other girls-baseball series like Princess Nine and Taisho Yakyuu Musume, and I always wonder what the point is of making a manga about girls’ baseball if you’re not going to take them seriously.

In particular I can’t help comparing Shiratama! to Macmillan Koukou Joshi Yakyuubu, another short 4-koma manga about a girls’ baseball team. While both series start with the usual character introductions and amusing occurrences, the latter half of Macmillan is taken up by a well-drawn and interesting national tournament on par with any other sports manga and the whole “girls! and they’re playing baseball!” issue never comes up at all. Shiratama! on the other hand ends without Tsubame and her team ever playing any official matches, but they do have fun pretending to be a team. The distant end of the future shows that their juniors do eventually make the team a serious contender, but it’s really no thanks to our gang.

As far as moe manga goes, Shiratama! doesn’t have any interesting characters to latch on to. “Loli-lites in high school” has been done a hundred times before, in far more interesting ways as well. Furthermore, probably because it’s so short, the series never focuses enough on any one character. Thus character traits are raised and quickly abandoned, certain characters don’t appear for long periods of time (Kaname for example, but even main characters like Tsubame can drop out of sight), some characters appear so late that not much can be done about them, etc etc. You really don’t know who to follow or who to support and you’re never given any reason to do so either.

As a comedy manga Shiratama! barely cracks the ‘slightly amusing’ line. If you can’t see the jokes coming a million miles away, you need to read more manga. For example our main character, Tsubame is a high school girl who looks all of 10 years old. You can’t expect the author not to joke about this, but you can and should expect something better than 10 different “mistaken for a grade schooler” gags. It gets old after number 0.

tl;dr Shiratama! is not very good. Whether you like loli, moe, sports, characters skits or comedy you’ll still be disappointed if you try it. On the other hand if you do somehow like it, it’s only 1 volume of fairly simple Japanese, so pick it up if you can find it.