Tag: Shounen

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.

Little Boy manga review

Little Boy is a miserable excuse for a manga. Its only redeeming feature is that it’s about baseball. And I suppose there might be points of interest for Mitsuru Adachi fans, since he drew the art for this series. Since this manga came out in 1974, early in Adachi’s career, it might be interesting to people seeking to trace the evolution of his art, before he settled on the same few character archetypes and evidently decided, why fix what ain’t broke? The story is by Mamoru Sasaki, who I’d never heard of before and hope to never hear of again.
I’ll skip lengthy explanations of the story and characters because it really doesn’t deserve it. I’ll just say it gets worse and worse as the series progresses and it’s a good thing Little Boy only lasted one volume. Gou, the main character only gets more and more difficult, rude, selfish and impossible to root for. In many series this is balanced out by letting you root for the rival instead, but all the “rivals” in this series show up for only a few pages a chapter to lose unceremoniously to Gou’s overwhelming skill and power. The one match he does lose isn’t satisfying either, because he isn’t that torn up over it. He’s just like, welp, gotta work harder. Typical shonen hero.

little_boy_034His ‘girlfriend’ Michi isn’t worth writing home about either. Gou threw one bloody ball (literally) which landed near her, and that makes her go all “I’ll follow you forever!” Michi even kicks up a stink when Gou agrees to marry another girl so the other girl can teach him a secret pitch (because that’s the kind of guy Gou is. He sucks.) The question of what she sees in him is never, ever answered. Unless it has to do with their mutual fetish for public peeing (yes, you read that right). Every Jack has his Jill, as the saying goes.

For the reasons I’ve mentioned above, Little Boy has zero merit as a romance or character-based manga. More importantly, because of the monotony of the matches, the nastiness of Gou and the colorlessness of the opposing batters, it has zero merit as a sports manga as well. The art is actually decent for a manga that old, and the action is always simple and easy to follow, but that’s as far as it goes for the positive side of this manga.

Macmillan Koukou Joshi Koushiki Yakyuubu chapter 2

Chapter 2 of Macmillan Koukou Joshi Koushiki Yakyuubu introduces the pitcher and the catcher, which is very kind of it because you can’t really have a baseball manga without them. What’s more, it illustrates what I said in the last post about the tsundere catcher making everything awkward.

When you think about it, she probably has the most natural reaction to having a guy suddenly show up and become manager of a girl’s team (i.e. wtf is this guy’s problem?) but her prickly reaction stands out all the more because the rest of the team have resolutely determined that this it is not a problem.

Anyway, spoiling a bit here, but Ueda does relax a bit and get along better with the rest of the team as the series goes on (all 30 chapters of it). Unlike what you might expect, Masakiyo doesn’t pull a “mighty whitey” and solve all the girls’ problems for them. For the most part they work through their issues together as a team, and Masakiyo is mostly there on the sidelines supporting them. Also there isn’t really any romance in the series, so don’t get your hopes up.

Apparently, after series ended after 30 chapters in Bessatsu Shonen Magazine, it was picked up by Weekly Shonen Magazine and rebooted as the rather more fanservicey 2-volume “Macmillan no Joshi Yakyuubu” series I thought the original ended very well, so I have no real interest in following the ‘sequel,’ but it’s out there if you finish this and are interested in what happens next. Happy reading!

Macmillan Koukou Joshi Koushiki Yakyuubu

In English Macmillan Koukou Joshi Koushiki Yakyuubu would be mean something like “The Macmillan High School Girls’ Hardball Baseball Club.” A 2-volume 4-koma gag manga about girl’s hardball baseball, which is apparently a real thing in Japan, even though there are only 16 teams at the high-school level, in this manga at least.

One would think that premise would be interesting enough, but the author went further. Male sports teams in manga tend to have female managers, so the author gave the Macmillan team a male manager instead.

Since Masakiyo is a rare breed of high school boy (even in this ‘politically correct’ age) who loves cooking, sewing and laundry and has relatively no interest in or knowledge about sports or girls, it would seem he’s not much different from your female regular team manager. And indeed, possibly because the manga is so short that there was no time to explore complex concepts, remarkably little fuss is made about his presence on the team. His classmates tease him only a little, with one exception the girls get used to having him around quickly and don’t really treat him as a ‘boy’ and he himself doesn’t spend any time thinking about gender roles, he just gets on with the washing and mending.

Macmillan Yakyuubu is short, but it does manage to cover the ‘essentials’ of baseball manga – training, rivals, team bonding and, of course, Koshien. Everything is handled lightly but not necessarily comically. This is one of the least gag-heavy 4-koma I’ve ever read. It’s very laid-back slice-of-lifeish, though the last few chapters have quite a bit of sports action and some rather predictable drama.

I wish I could say the characters are all likeable, but the pitcher really lets the side down. Apart from her, all the other team members are hardworking, friendly, fun-loving and cheerful. The pitcher is just your typical high-maintenance tsundere who often ruins the mood for everyone concerned, the reader included. She’s also the one who just can’t get over the fact that Masakiyo is a guy, and keeps making things awkward all the time. Still, she gets better quickly, and in any case there’s no time for that kind of drama once the Koshien Tournament rolls around.

All in all, Macmillan Koukou Joshi Koushiki Yakyuubu is a pretty good read. I liked that the author didn’t try to shoehorn laughs in where they didn’t belong (Mr. Fullswing, are you listening?!), the sports action was well-drawn and easy to follow, the series is short enough that it ends before it get tiresome, and apart from the first chapter it has very little fanservice. Most of all, I really appreciate the existence of at least one manga about a guy surrounded by girls that doesn’t devolve into a harem manga. Most of the characters keep their heads on and their eyes on the prize the whole time, even when they’re having fun. Good stuff!

Bench – one-shot by Masashi Kishimoto

A one-shot manga by Masashi Kishimoto, author of Naruto. I haven’t read any Naruto in roughly 8 years, but I liked it in the early days so the author is okay in my books. The blurb on mangaupdates is as follows:

Transfer student Yamaguchi Tsutomu has just joined the baseball team. Yamaguchi is overweight and can’t run very fast, so the coach places him on the “D” team. Unlike the “A” team which is has nothing but aces, the “D” team is filled with baseball misfits who don’t expect to see any playing time. Despite this setback, Yamaguchi is determined not to give up his dream of someday becoming a pro second baseman! 

The story behind Bench itself is… boring. I like baseball well enough, and I like stories about underdogs doing their best. That’s the story behind 90% of shounen manga anyway, so I might as well like it. But this story isn’t funny or interesting and it doesn’t go anywhere. The D-team does really suck, the A team bullies them for sucking, the main character shouts them down with garbage about Effort and Love of Baseball! But in typical Kishimoto fashion, the D-team suckers are also (ex-)elites, which makes them the same as the A-team and defeats the whole point of the “effort and love” story they have going on there. Why am I not surprised?

Anyway, the two D-team elites end up having a challenge against the A-team, but since they’re both elites it doesn’t matter who wins either way. It’s good this was a one-shot, because there’s no room for continuation. Two guys who were good and suffered temporary setbacks find a way of working around those setbacks. It sounds really heartwarming when you put it that way, and it might have stayed that way if Kishimoto hadn’t insisted on making the A-team A-holes and bringing up his [elite]-vs-[normal]=(elite wins and normal might as well not bother) theory again. In the end defeat = friendship, but the same goes for 99% of all other shounen manga so no surprises there.

Well, it was worth a read at least. I regret reading the online version though. It doesn’t read very well, and they got the Oh/Hanshin reference wrong right off the bat. The reason it’s a problem that Oh (the character) is a Hanshin fan is because he has the same name as the most famous Yomiuri Giants player of all time (Sadaharu Oh), and the Giants and Hanshin are bitter rivals. It’s like someone named George Best being a Manchester City fan, or someone named Babe Ruth being a Red Sox fan. Or something like that. I’m not too good at sports history.

Now, a minor mixup like that doesn’t affect the manga as a whole, but it doesn’t inspire faith in the translation either, especially when it’s so literal. “Anti-athlete’s body.” “Overly-serious tub of lard.” “As the ex-A team ace with a crushed shoulder.” “4th-seater.” (shouldn’t that be “cleanup?”) There should be smoother ways to put it than that.

Disclaimer: Translation is hard work, the translators are doing this for free and in a very short amount of time because they’re rushing to beat other releases (the fools), I make mistakes in my own writing and translation all the time. I’m just saying, that’s why I like to read manga in the original Japanese where possible. I was too lazy to hunt down a raw today, but stuff like this shows me that it’s worth the extra effort.