Cross Game Volume 4

Leave a reply

By Mitsuru Adachi. Released in Japan in 2 separate volumes by Shogakukan, serialized in the magazine Shonen Sunday. Released in North America by Viz.

Summer is here, and that means it’s time for another volume of Cross Game, which Viz has cleverly set up to be released one per season for the next 2 years. (OK, that may be coincidence, but it’s nice to think about.) There’s lots of baseball here, as well as lots of Ko and Aoba. It’s just what we want in an Adachi manga.

For starters, we meet the guy who showed up at the end of last volume, Mizuki. He’s clearly nuts about Aoba, ad just as clearly is not going to get anywhere. This is played with nicely – Aoba has to change the way she gallivants around the house with a boy living there now, and Momiji is quick to pick up on this and tease her for it. Moreover, he manages to kill the rumors that Ko and Aoba are dating – which admittedly doesn’t lead to much yet, but that’s likely as the focus of the last half of this omnibus is baseball. For the most part, though, as a rival Mizuki fails. But since he was never intended to be serious, that’s not all that bad a thing.

(And yes, as noted, you can marry your first cousin in Japan, though it’s done far less frequently than it once was. Hence the need to make the belabored joke here.)

Meanwhile, we continue to see Ko and Aoba’s similarities, which are almost eerie at times. It’s shown time and time again how they think almost exactly alike, and can read each other better than anyone else out there. This can be a plus – neither of them can hide a minor injury form each other for long – but is also serving to keep things distant between the two, as Aoba is quick to note that Ko and Wakaba weren’t just hanging out all the time, they were a genuine couple – even if Ko wouldn’t admit it. At least we get to see Aoba actually get flustered by Ko for once, when he gets right in her face trying to show what the cameras at Koshien will be like.

I mentioned Wakaba, and her presence is still felt here. Aside form the aforementioned discussion, we see a nice scene of Ichiyo, the oldest sister, trying to show Ko that it’s possible to move on and find new love. Ko, of course, remains reticent on the subject. There’s also a lovely montage of Momiji’s memories of playing with Wakaba and Ko when she was a little girl, and her realization that time will eventually move on. But not yet – Ko buys Wakaba a sparkly pendant for her 17th birthday, just as her list asked.

And of course there is baseball. We meet Mishima, a player on the rival Ryuou team, and you know that he’s meant to be a feature of the series because Azuma remembers his name. He’s good too, with Ko noting that he’s the one batter that he’s really worried about. Of course, he’s not actually PLAYING due to another slugger wanting all the glory and convincing the coach to leave him on the bench. It’s been rather startling how much power politics has been in these volumes – and how it’s nice to see Ko’s team as the one who’s there to play the game, with everyone contributing.

The volume ends on a cliffhanger, of course, so the outcome of the game isn’t known. Still, at this halfway point, the series shows no signs of flagging or getting boring. I will admit that we have had it hammered home a great deal how alike Ko and Aoba are, and indeed they seem to be slowly inching towards a realization. The male rival didn’t do anything to sway Aoba’s heart at all. Hrm… perhaps a distaff counterpart?

Sasameke Volume 2

2 Replies

By Ryuji x Gotsubo. Released in Japan by Kadokawa Shoten, serialized in the magazine Shonen Ace. Released in North America by Yen Press.

Having just read through my review of the first volume of this manga, I did not particularly like it at all. So it may be somewhat of a surprise to see me reviewing the 2nd volume. I’m a stubborn guy, though, and one feature of that review was that I was defending the second volume’s right to exist, saying that it should not be cancelled based on bad word of mouth, even if it was a horrible manga. Well, Yen has now put out the second volume, and I thank them for that.

That will be the last word of praise you hear in this review. This volume actually managed to be worse than the first. MUCH worse.

On the somewhat bright side, there is a lot more soccer in this volume than there was in the first. Given this is a soccer manga, that can only be a good thing. Sadly, we continue to follow the exploits of the most annoying team ever, so the soccer does not rise to the occasion. We meet new players who hadn’t appeared (or barely) in Volume 1, such as Antonio. We then meet his four older brothers, who are playing for the other team, and who are all better than him. We have another team where the two stars are brothers, and the younger one tries to sabotage our heroes by kidnapping Inae because he loves his brother so much. Oh, and Rakuichi meets his archrival who he knew in Italy.

But wait, I hear you cry. What happened to the large amount of plot in Volume 1 regarding Maiko’s mother? Well, it was totally abandoned. She doesn’t appear in this volume. Hell, Maiko barely appears in this volume, mostly showing up as a comedic foil for whatever foolishness is going on and to provide the book’s climax. Indeed, every time we seem to be getting any plot development, it simply ends. Matsuri rescues a child, and proceeds to flirt with the kid’s mother, who is the wife of the opposing coach… except that’s it. Done just so the opposing coach can cry.

Then there’s Rakuichi, who spends this volume much like he did the last one, whining and bitching. He gets no chance to score a goal or justify everyone calling him talented (OK, he can run downfield with the ball well), and still has no desire for teamwork whatsoever. The author admitted in a note that he wanted to try drawing a team where the heroes were all lazy slackers, but he ended up with this instead. I’ve got news for him – he succeeded. There are precisely zero characters that you feel any empathy towards or want to see succeed.

Despite all of this, they manage to get through the qualifying rounds and end up in the final tournament in Tokyo. I was rather leery at this point, as I saw we only had about 40 pages left in the book. And then we get the ending. Oh my god. I’ve seen endings where the author was told “you’re cancelled next issue, wrap it up” before, but this really takes the cake. The team gets disqualified due to its president’s financial irregularities (which was lampshaded a bit earlier, somewhat incoherently, but lampshaded), and the school forces the team to disband.

My jaw dropped. This isn’t just ‘we only got to the second round, but next year we’ll be the champions’ ending you see in so many sports mangas, this is an active ‘screw you’ to everyone who has been reading this. It reminded me of the final episode of Seinfeld in the way that it seemed to show a total antipathy to its readers. Then it spends the last 10 pages showing everyone but Rakuichi is now successful, and dissolves into incoherence. No really, the last page is merely shonen one-liners spouted off, even the author notes it’s incoherent.

I haven’t mentioned the art, I notice. Suffice to say that it didn’t improve from Volume 1, and has the same issues. It reads like the author put out his first draft every week due to time constraints, without bothering to fix anything. Heck, the plot reads like that too, not only dropping things from chapter to chapter, but sometimes form page to page!

Apparently this manga did succeed fairly well when it first came out. The author mentions merchandise for sale a few times, and it doesn’t seem to read like a put on. There’s also some fanart on deviantart that seems to date from 2007, so some folks must have enjoyed it. And there’s a 4-volume sequel, god help us all. But to be honest, I spent most of my time reading this wondering what possessed Yen Press to license it in the first place? It being a sports manga doesn’t seem to be a big selling point, and it’s not a parody of sports manga or a gag manga, despite flirting with both of those slots unsuccessfully. It’s just a formless shapeless mess.

I did note, on Googling, that the author is known for one other thing besides his manga (which apparently continue in Shonen Ace to this day). When Twilight came out in Japan, they added illustrations and manga covers to the books, to make it more like a ‘light novel’. And Ryuji Gotsubo did those illustrations. Now, this is mere baseless speculation, but I wonder if, upon Yen getting the rights to the Twilight graphic novels they’re doing, there was a rider indicating they had to put out some of this author’s work? After all there have been weirder contracts.

I worry that some people, on reading this review, might think that Sasameke is one of those ‘fun’ bad manga, something to enjoy along the lines of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Let me tell you straight out, it isn’t. It is one of the most frustrating, irritating, and annoying manga ever put out in North America, and you will be grinding your teeth by the end if you even manage to get through it. Yen put out Volume 2, and good for them, but I beg them now: don’t license the sequel. Please?

The Stellar Six of Gingacho Volume 3

3 Replies

By Yuuki Fujimoto. Released in Japan as “Kirameki☆Gingachou Shoutengai” by Hakusensha, serialized in the magazine Hana to Yume. Released in North America by Tokyopop.

And so sadly we come to the end of this series in North America. I’m not optimistic about any license rescues, so it looks as if Volumes 4-10 will only be available in Japanese for the foreseeable future. Which is a shame, as this is a great volume of slice-of-life shoujo manga, and we’re finally starting to see at least one of the four other friends get some development.

The last volume of this series seems to have only come out via Diamond Distribution’s comic book stores – Amazon and Right Stuf never shipped it. Indeed, it was very hard to find any cover art at all that didn’t have ‘art not final’ stamped on it.

As for the volume itself, thankfully there seems to be only one of the ‘Mike wants everyone to be best friends 4-evah’ type of story we saw so often in the first two volumes. This leaves us with more regarding the relationship between Mike and Kuro. Mike is mostly as dense as ever (Q even tries hugging her close to show that she only feels ‘weird’ about it when Kuro does it, though this backfires on him spectacularly), but after the final story where she cheerfully agrees to go on a date with another guy without realizing what it actually is, she seems to at least start to get the idea that life is not all about happy smiles and that eventually real love and affection is going to have to come into play.

The character who gets the best focus here is Sato, the shy wallflower girl of the six friends. She’s at a different school from the others, and doesn’t stand out as much among the insane eccentrics in her group, so not only is she feeling depressed and inadequate, other kids are talking about her as the odd one out. Naturally, they stick her with the class rep job, the traditional job given in manga to the last person who wants it. Nothing unique or surprising happens here – with the help of her friends who show her that they love her no matter what, she’s able to overcome her fears and worries – but it’s still a heartwarming story nonetheless.

Mike and Kuro have been the focus of the romance to date, so it’s intriguing to see that we may be seeing the other four get in on the act. Kuro drags Sato along to pose as his date while he stalks Mike on hers, which shows that in many ways he can be Mike’s equal in cluelessness, as we note that she seems to have a crush on him. More intriguingly, in the funniest chapter of the book, where the three boys are candidly snapped for a gossip magazine and then become local ‘hottie’ celebrities, we get Kuro implying Q also has a crush. Indeed, Kuro’s angry “Mr. Eternally Unrequited Love” gets Q rather annoyed, and clearly it’s a plot point we would learn more about in future volumes were they coming out.

As I noted when I reviewed Happy Cafe, this type of shoujo manga is something we saw quite a bit of from CMX and Tokyopop but less from Viz. As a result, I suspect we won’t be seeing much of this genre, the manga where romance is there but not the focus, and you end up simply smiling at reminiscence of those happy childhood/teenage memories. Despite my above cynicism, I do hope that one day we find out how Mike and Kuro will get together, and see if the other four also find happiness (with each other? Well, it is that type of manga, so I wouldn’t be surprised). Try to track down a copy of this if you can.