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Stopper Busujima manga review

Quick comments on Stopper Busujima by Harold Sakuishi, since I’m still on a baseball manga kick. The Stopper Busujima story summary goes like so:

A professional baseball manga by Harold Sakuishi, the author of Beck.

Taiko Busujima is a powerful young pitcher looking to make it into the Japanese big leagues, but what he didn’t count on was being signed to the Keihin Athletics, the cheapest and worst team in the league. Can he help turn the Athletics around and (gasp) win the pennant?

A gripping, edge-of-your-seat story loaded with Sakuishi’s brand of wacky humor.

It does have some wacky humor in it, but I don’t know about the “gripping, edge-of-your-seat part. For one thing, much of it is way too unrealistic. This wouldn’t be a problem for a sports manga like Prince of Tennis which doesn’t even try to be realistic, but for a manga that uses many real-life characters, half of the things that go on just don’t make any sense. First off, it’s bizarre enough that an untried, untested pitcher with a history of causing trouble like Busujima even got signed professionally in the first place.

But having been signed, it makes zero sense for him to be immediately sent up to the majors. It almost never happens in real life, and when it does it almost never works out. And rookies who do immediately go to the majors are those considered almost perfect in technique, stamina, etc, none of which Busujima possesses. With that 160 km/h pitch, he’s actually a huge danger to all those around him because of his lack of control. No team, no matter how desperate would put him in their first team immediately.

The second problem with Stopper Busujima is Busujima’s personality… or lack of one. We don’t often get into his head, and when we do he isn’t thinking much. That’s fine in the beginning because he’s made out to be a rough, dumb, instinct-type kind of character. That makes it much more amusing watching other characters react to him.

Now there’s no way he could get through the whole series without any character development, but Sakuishi just went too far and basically neutered the guy. By volume 5 he’s a shadow of his former self, reduced to a normal good-guy typical shounen hero. Hard-working, cares about his team, serious to a fault, etc etc. He’s barely the same character any more so it’s really boring.

Third problem, and the reason why I didn’t bother continuing after volume 5 is that there are too many characters and it’s not interesting any more. In the space of a few short chapters Sakuishi introduces all kinds of new characters when he hasn’t even finished dealing with the old ones yet.

Shimizu, for example, is made out to be so important in the beginning and then he just completely disappears for several volumes. I even forgot he existed! So while some mangaka can juggle a huge cast and keep them all relevant, Harold Sakuishi doesn’t seem to be one of those. The writing is on the wall that the manga is just going to go downhill from that point onwards, so I bailed out while the going was good.

Last problem: introducing the ‘cool older brother’ after 5 volumes. It worked for Naruto and for Inuyasha and in general it’s a successful enough trope that it shows up all the time, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. And it would be one thing if the older brother came back when Busujima was still wild and crazy Busujima, but he’s all Sasuke at that point so it’s like, meh. Boring.

Having said all that, it’s not like Stopper Busujima is a bad manga. It has its good parts, especially in the early days when Busujima is still trying to find his feet and hasn’t become the mega-phenomenon he’s beginning to turn into by volume 5. There’s some humor in there, and baseball manga set in the pros is usually much more interesting than high school manga for me because there’s a wider range of topics they can deal with. High school baseball always has some girl or another in it and there’s always Koshien to aim for, blah blah blah. Whereas the sky’s basically the limit for manga set in the pros.

tl;dr Stopper Busujima is worth a read for the first few volumes if you like baseball manga and crazy characters, but after that it’s only worth continuing if you like typical shounen developments in your seinen manga.

Rannyuu Koshien Foul chapter 1

Rannyuu Koshien Foul (乱入甲子園ファウル) is a seinen high school baseball manga by Hideo Iura. It tells the tale of Naoto Yoshimura, a naive high school freshman who joins his high school baseball team in the hopes of making it to Koshien. Why? Because of a girl. There’s only one small problem: the Irokawa High baseball team is filled with cranks and weirdos of every shape and form. Do they stand a chance in hell?

Heh heh, good question. It’s a 2-volume manga so the odds are against them, but I won’t tell you how it ends. I encourage you to seek it out and buy it if you can (volume 2 is here) because it’s funny and interesting stuff and I particularly like the characters. In most baseball manga everyone feels like an extra except the main character and one or two others, but even though it’s so short everyone in Rannyuu Koshien Foul (except one who is supposed to be overlooked) gets plenty of time in the spotlight.

But we can discuss the details of the series at a later date. Incidentally it seems the real title of the manga is Foul and the [Rannyuu Koshien] part is supposed to be kind of in brackets or something like that. Typical bizarreness for a typically bizarre series. ‘Rannyuu’ means ‘run-in’ and Koshien stands for the National High School Baseball Tournament, though you probably know that if you’ve ever read a baseball manga before. So Rannyuu Koshien Foul = Baseball Tournament Run-in Foul, more or less. What could it mean? Does it matter? Read the manga and find out for yourself!

4-Ban Sado manga review

4-Ban Sado is a one-volume baseball manga by Aoyama Gosho, a fairly well-known shounen mangaka. And by “fairly well-known” I mean he’s the author of the absurdly long-running never-getting-anywhere Detective Conan/Case Closed. Since he’s so busy with Conan it’s not strange that he doesn’t have much time to devote to any other series. It’s understandable, but 4-Ban Sado could have been a very interesting manga in the hands of someone with more time and attention to devote to developing the concept within.

Story summary from mangaupdates: About a boy who plays baseball for his school and has a magical bat, but every time he hits a pitch he has to pay money to keep it.

The boy’s name is Shigeo Nagashima and he is named after a famous Japanese batter. Because of that his team makes him the clean up and third baseman like his namesake, even though he can’t hit worth a lick. One day he stumbles across a mysterious sporting goods store and gets a magic bat that allegedly belonged to Babe Ruth and which is capable of hitting any pitch. The catch is he has to pay for it by putting money into his back pocket. Matters are further complicated when the mysterious store owner gives a magic pitcher’s glove to a superstar pitcher and sets the two on a collision course. It’s the unbreakable shield vs. invincible spear dilemma again… or maybe not.

As I said, plenty could have been done with the idea if the manga had been longer. And if the protagonist Nagashima had been smarter about things. A bad batter with a good bat is still a bad batter, so all he ever knows how to do is stick a random amount of money in his pocket and hope for the best. Not smart.

For example, he really should have tried harder to figure out the full capabilities of the bat. What kind of hit do you get for 100 yen? 200? 1000? He makes a weak attempt in the beginning, then throws everything out of the window quickly and uses whatever amount of money he has on hand. This comes to bite him in the butt at least once when he puts everything he has into a hit… and it turns out to be a foul. It’s also really stupid that all he ever aims for are big homeruns when he could win more cheaply and more efficiently with well-placed singles/doubles/triples.

Also, strangely enough, nobody ever suspects anything when this weakling suddenly starts belting them out of the park on a regular basis. Again, maybe in a longer manga reporters and rival teams would have come sniffing around, especially when it got to the Koshien stage. There’s also the issue of Shigeo’s love interest Enatsu (named after legendary pitcher Yutaka Enatsu) who seems like she will have a key role to play in the story but is instead relegated to sitting in the stands doing absolutely nothing for the bulk of the story.

And so on and so forth. There are lots of wasted ideas and plenty of unexplored potential in 4-Ban Sado. The whole thing was so rushed and unsatisfying, it’s a real waste of potential. It’s only 1 volume long and it’s by a famous mangaka, so it should be easy enough to find on Amazon if you’re interested. Don’t say I didn’t warn you when you’re disappointed, though.

Iruka-chan Yoroshiku manga review

Iruka-chan Yoroshiku (いるかちゃんヨロシク) is a sports/romance shoujo manga by Masaru Urakawa. It ran in the mid-80s for 7 volumes, though I’m not sure of the exact timeline. There was a first series of 4 volumes, then it got renewed for another 3 and ended. The story is simple: A Wild Transfer Student Appears! If you’ve read manga for any length of time you must have encountered the Wild Transfer Student type. They’re cool and unusual and good at everything and somehow they get away with doing all kinds of wacky things that a normal student would never dream of. Wish fulfillment at its finest.

It’s the same with Iruka-chan Yoroshiku, where by virtue of being the principal’s granddaughter and extremely good at sports in a school that values athletics, Iruka Kisaragi basically runs roughshod over school rules and basic moral decency all in one go. In chapter 1, for example she antagonizes the school bully and not only refuses to apologize but actually physically attacks her and her lackeys. Oh sure there are all kinds of mitigating circumstances and Iruka herself isn’t a bad person, but she ranks rather low on the likeability scale as far as protagonists go.

The supporting cast is similarly bland. They may start out with their own agendas and personalities but by volume 3 the whole school is virtually a huge Iruka fanclub. Which isn’t all that strange, since Kurashika Academy explicitly values athletic ability above everything else. It makes for rather boring reading though.

What about the romance? It’s all right if you like foregone conclusions. And if you like the fact that Haruumi Yamamoto, the main guy, is basically Mr. Perfect. While he does show a few prideful and competitive traits early on, these are stripped away quickly leaving him as more or less Ken to Iruka’s Barbie. Bleh.

Well, then how is Iruka-chan Yoroshiku as a sports manga? Not bad at all, actually. I picked it up because it was labeled “baseball” on Mangaupdates, but as of volume 3 the only thing they have played is girls’ softball. It’s probably a mislabeling caused by someone who just flipped through the raws and didn’t actually read it. The softball and soccer games Iruka takes part in are moderately interesting and easy to follow, albeit rather heavy on the generic sports drama. But since Iruka-chan Yoroshiku is a romance/character manga and the romance and characters are both rather flat, it’s worth a quick read but not much more than that.

Shikotama manga review

Shikotama, an ecchi sports manga by Jun Nishikawa, ran in Bessatsu Shonen Champion in 3 volumes from 2012. There are two other manga also called Shikotama, but this one is about fanservice+baseball so don’t confuse them. This is the one I’m talking about: Shikotama on Mangaupdates. Ignore the nonsensical description over there.

Shikotama is about a girl named Tama who is a phenomenal pitcher (in name only. She’s not really all that good). She enrolls in a famous sports academy with the hopes of becoming their ace pitcher only to be told that girls can’t play with boys at the high school level. Interestingly enough it seems they can play with boys at the grade, middle school and college levels, though I’ve never actually seen a girl playing baseball at the college level with boys

She talks the boys on the team into giving her a pitching test, which she fails, but when she plays the “It’s because I’m a girl, isn’t it?!” card and they give her another challenge: form your own team and play against us. The winning team becomes the official school team. Thus Tama sets out to get people together, starting with a girl named Shiko, who has trained all her life to be a sumo wrestler. Shiko (catcher) + Tama (pitcher) = Shikotama.

I wish I could tell you how the manga ended, but I stopped reading after chapter 3 so I wouldn’t know. Since Shikotama is only 3 volumes long, it’s quite likely that the girls’ team failed to beat the regulars and continued playing normally, but I’m just guessing here. Like most manga about girls’ baseball, Shikotama is going to spend a lot of time first getting the team together before anything of note happens. There isn’t much sports action to be found in the earlier volumes, at any rate, apart from one pitch or one at-bat challenges.

The real reason I quit though, was because it’s a sports comedy manga that isn’t very sporty and isn’t very funny. It tries to make up for that lack with a truly ridiculous amount of fanservice, which is fine if you’re into that sort of thing but I’m not. If anything it makes Tama look even less talented than she already is when she resorts to showing off her bra and panties in every single game.

If you distract a world-class batter with your goods and manage to get a single strike against him, that does not make you a pitching genius. I’m not discounting the possibility that there might be female pitchers out there as good as male ones at the high school levels, but Shiko and Tama’s shenanigans and excessive fanservice only make them look desperate and inferior. It’s like Princess Nine all over again.

If you like fanservice, though, you might enjoy yourself. As a sumo wrestler big-busted Shiko wrestles takes on the whole sumo team dressed in only a skimpy loincloth and a few strategically-placed strands of hair. Then at the start of chapter 4 she wins a bet that lets her decide what the rest of the team will wear as training uniforms and chooses loincloths… Yup. I stopped reading at that point because it exceeded my acceptable levels of ecchiness. Shikotama is for fans of excessive fanservice and borderline nudity only.