baseball Archives - Page 7 of 10

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).

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.

Gamushara manga review

Another terrible manga from the terrible duo of Juhzo Yamasaki (writer) and Mitsuru Adachi (artist). Adachi has produced several all-time classics since he struck out on his own, but his early artist-only series SUCK.

I only finished Gamushara (がむしゃら) a few days ago, but I’ve already forgotten all the character names. It is completely unremarkable and not really worth a read, not even by someone like me who is currently grabbing any and all baseball manga I can get my hands on. By the way, all manga reviews on this blog will contain free, unmarked spoilers so, yeah. I probably should have said that earlier.

Anyway, the main guy on the cover there is a transfer student at a high school. He gets into an altercation with the guys on the regular baseball team and decides to form a softball team so he can go to the national softball tournament. As with many baseball series (e.g. Princess Nine, Taisho Yakyu Musume), a ridiculous amount of time is spent early on gathering members, even more time is wasted on some stupid rivalry and then the main character’s team loses the final match of the series but learns valuable lessons from it.

It’s a standard pattern, but in the case of Gamushara it rankles quite a bit because the main character is way off base. He is 100% in the wrong and probably has some serious personality problems. He picked the fight with the baseball team for no good reason and formed his own team largely to get back at them. Throughout the series he goes out of his way to antagonize and annoy them, yet somehow he’s treated as a hero for his pettiness. It’s very hard to swallow, which is why I took to skipping large chunks of volume 2. At least it was short, that’s all I have to say. I can’t think of a single redeeming feature of Gamushara, because even the baseball sections were boring, poorly-written and predictable. Another manga for hardcore Adachi fans only, I guess.