Reviews - Animefangirl!

Otasukebito Hashiru! chapter 1b

Reading chapter 1b will be enough to give you an idea of the shift in power that characterizes the rest of volume 1 of Otasukebito Hashiru! (おたすけ人走る!). Before and during the entrance exam, Kana held all the cards. She could decide who got in and who stayed out and there wasn’t a thing they could do about it. Once the entrance exam ends and the new students are selected, however, they become the new heroes of the school. Nothing is too good for them, since they hold the future of the school in their hands while Kana is now just another student. Now then, what will they do with their new found power?

I don’t want to spoil the whole story, but if you suspect that Sukesaku Oda with a little bit of power is going to be a serious jerk, you are not far wrong. It was hard not to feel sorry for Kana at time, but she retains just enough selfish and mean tendencies to make it hard to root for either one.That’s all in volume 1. As the series progresses, Oda starts to like Kana more, a rival for her affections appears and she doesn’t seem to entirely hate him any more by the end of the series. Volume 2 is spent on the team’s qualification for the Koshien tournament, with all the wacky hijinks this entails, while Volume 3 is spent on the actual tournament itself.

The series blurb promised that Otasukebito was funny, but I didn’t get any real laughs until volume 3, where Oda inadvertently pisses off the umpires for his match in a cross-dressing incident and then has to deal with the inevitable fall out when they decide to take revenge. A picture speaks a thousand words:

The series becomes a more than decent sports manga in the last volume, featuring a typically long baseball game full of ups and downs, twists and turns and drama galore. It was very interesting stuff, though a little hard to believe in places.

Unfortunately this focus on pure sports and away from the gags and romantic tension that defined the earlier volumes was probably the downfall of the series. All the other characters fell by the wayside as this became a sports manga worthy of Shonen Jump or any other boys’ magazine. Not bad at all, but not the sort of thing you’d see in Margaret Comics. Or maybe there was some other reason for the series to end somewhat abruptly. I thought the characters needed a bit of help in the likeability department, but they got some laughs out of me in volume 3 and the sports component was satisfactory, so I was sorry to see it go. No sense living in the past though, so on to the next series!

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.