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Post by berkley on Apr 17, 2023 22:22:48 GMT -5
deleted - was trying to edit my previous post for spelling but clicked the quote button by mistake.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 19, 2023 22:49:12 GMT -5
OK, so I just read Slam Dunk vol. 1.
I'm going to preface my comments with a couple things:
First, I have zero interest in high school drama of any kind, I, in fact, actively hate it. Sometimes one can just ignore it and enjoy the rest of the story (Stuff like Evangelion and Assassination Classroom.. even My Hero Academia to some extent), but the other stuff has to be really good to make up for it.
Second, I came in with very low expectations.
That said, it was worse than I thought it would be. The main character (who may or may not be the main character for long) was ridiculous. He was supposed to be, but I've never been able to get into that. That sort of character is fine for comic effect, but as the hero? Nope.
The whole story is him trying to impress a girl, and the basketball is just because she likes it and her brother is the captain. But of course she likes someone else who doesn't like her, because that's how Manga is. Blech.
There was no actual basketball in this volume, only practices and nonsense. Keeping in mind the author says he's a fan...
He shows a high school kid that has never played before be able to jump like Jordan, and he makes a completely ridiculous superhero posterizing dunk to the team captain to impress the girl. Fine, it's manga. But the he's polishing basketballs??? that's not a thing. They have like 50 of them.. why? Makes no sense. There's apparently no coach, just a kid that's captain... then there's a girl they call the manager (also not a thing) that seems to be the skill expert.
They talk about fundamentals being important, which is great, but then they have the main character dribble in place on one knee.. for a week? That is also not a thing. Then there's the bit when they have the players introduce themselves, and one of them is 5-4, which the others are over 6 feet and can all dunk. That's not working, unless they have Spud Webb along with Jordan on this random high school team.
I may still read the other 2 I took out of the library since there sitting there on the shelf, and it can't really be any worse.. maybe it even gets a little better.
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Post by commond on Apr 20, 2023 7:03:45 GMT -5
I also read the first volume in anticipation of your post. Needless to say, I enjoyed it quite a bit more than you did. Disregarding whatever feelings you have about shonen manga, I think some of the criticisms you had of it are due to an unfamiliarity with Japanese junior high school and senior high school club activities. Almost everything you said isn't a thing really is a thing, albeit exaggerated for comedic effect. There really are team managers and cleaning duties and excessive drills. The coach shows up in Vol 2. The early part of the story is set in Spring when the students are still having orientation and choosing clubs. That's the reason why there aren't any games in the early volumes. Sakuragi is a bit of an idiot, but he's a teen delinquent so that's hardly surprising. The love triangle is a fairly typical trope, but it's hardly surprising given that Sakuragi is set up as a guy who is constantly rejected by girls and Fukawara is set up early on as Sakuragi's rival.
I enjoyed it. It's amusing and the characters are fun. It was Inoue's first manga, so the story and art improve as the manga progresses, but he has great energy and lots of solid cartooning. I can understand why it appeals to Japanese readers as it's both an underdog story and a coming of age high school story. Slam Dunk is synonymous with basketball in Japan. I know of a couple of first grade elementary school boys who are into basketball and they're both Slam Dunk fans. One of them even has a cool Slam Dunk jacket.
I really liked the part where he does the Jordan dunk and hits his head on the backboard.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 20, 2023 7:31:45 GMT -5
It might be a Japanese club thing (I've read lots of manga, but not much school manga, just not what I like), but it's not a basketball thing.. if they're doing that, maybe that's why you do see alot of Japanese NBA players .
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Post by commond on Apr 20, 2023 8:05:45 GMT -5
Trust me, it's a club thing. Japan produces a lot of kids who can ball. Whether they can make it to the NBA is something else. I don't think that has much to do with the manga itself. Millions of people around the world enjoy basketball without ever making it to the NBA, and one of the central themes of the manga is a love of basketball.
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Post by arfetto on Apr 20, 2023 13:15:36 GMT -5
I will write my own review of volume one in a few days and post it in this thread. I re-read the first three volumes in one sitting last week and still came away totally impressed, even though these are just the early comedic chapters.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 20, 2023 20:21:48 GMT -5
Trust me, it's a club thing. Japan produces a lot of kids who can ball. Whether they can make it to the NBA is something else. I don't think that has much to do with the manga itself. Millions of people around the world enjoy basketball without ever making it to the NBA, and one of the central themes of the manga is a love of basketball. I felt like they were at best satirizing and at worst mocking the game. Having a kid be able to be a star having never played before to impress a girl isn't respecting the game, IMO. The art of them blocking shots looked like a typical manga fight scene, which was super weird and not really how basketball works. Overall in the first one, there was really very little basketball, other then being told how amazing the main characters are. After thinking about it a bit.. I realized the plot is very much like Grease with a bit of a love triangle tossed in.. I wonder is that's on purpose?
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Post by commond on Apr 20, 2023 20:45:48 GMT -5
He doesn’t become a star straight away. He fouls out of every game he plays in the beginning. Eventually, he develops specific skills and gradually he discovers that he’s grown to love the game of basketball instead of playing it to impress Haruko. The star player is his rival, Fukawa. Sakuragi has natural athleticism, which is why he can leap so high but in the beginning he can’t dunk. The second time he tries to dunk on Akagi he slams the ball on Akagi’s head.
There is more basketball in the second volume though it’s just a scrimmage game during practice. The artwork is fairly dynamic. Inoie does a good job of capturing the action. It’s not that easy to draw figures in motion, but he does a good job. The blocks are a bit stylized but he’s trying to capture the visual and auditory experience in the same panel.
There’s a love story in practically every manga. In this case, it’s a bunch of high school crushes. It hasn’t really been explored yet. Again, it’s very typical of Japanese high school and appeals to the target audience as well as adult’s nostalgia.
I don’t see how it mocks the game. It is clearly a love letter to the sport. I mean, I hat that the genre might be a bit childish, but at no point does Inoie mock the sport and no-one in Japan ever felt that way. The manga and anime inspired countless numbers of kids to pick up a basketball and play the game.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 21, 2023 8:52:02 GMT -5
Maybe it was just the first one I'm definitely still going to read #2 and #3 at least
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Post by pinkfloydsound17 on Apr 21, 2023 13:26:47 GMT -5
I read comics for escapism and fun. The fact that they made movies about the comics is an added bonus and expansion of the medium that I like
I watch sports (mainly hockey) for the competitive aspect and highs and lows of winning and losing with my favourite team. I cannot in my wildest dreams imagine getting any of that from a comic that I would care about. Would it be retelling hockey history, if that is the sport I pick? For that, I would honestly rather read an autobiography or article. Or watch some old footage. I just cannot imagine taking a sport I love and making it the focus of the comic. And in terms of making it fantastical (a boy who could skate and shoot faster than anyone else), well that exists already and tends to happen every few decades...so again, not seeing how it would ever work to where I would be interested.
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Post by pinkfloydsound17 on Apr 21, 2023 13:28:19 GMT -5
To me, I think sports like that are a good challenge/opportunity for a comic artist to really let loose and see what they can do to keep the reader interest.
Now, that is good. Really good stuff by the look of it. I take back what I said. It is but I would not want to read an entire comic detailing a snooker game. Would rather play it! Or if I was a die hard fan, watch it live.
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Post by berkley on Apr 21, 2023 13:55:36 GMT -5
Hockey does play a role in a couple of Jeff LeMire GN about Canadian life. Essex County is one, which I have read, and I have another on my shelf that I haven't gotten to yet called Roughneck ... where one of the main characters is a retired hockey player. -M
Missed this earlier. I just finished the Essex County collected edition last month and the hockey-related stories were some of the bits i enjoyed most. I hadn't been aware of Roughneck until now but it sounds like it might be similar in style and subject matter to Essex County Ghost Stories so I'll have a look for that next time in in one of the bookstores around here.
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Post by berkley on Apr 21, 2023 14:01:08 GMT -5
I can't vouch for any of these, but it looks like Europe also has some interesting-looking sports comics. ... There's also material like Trevor von Eeden's two-part, somewhat fictionalized biography of boxing legend Jack Johnson, called the Original Johnson: It's really good, but that's because a) von Eeden is a great storyteller, b) Johnson was a fascinating figure, and c) the focus isn't restricted to just the boxing. This is the cover to the second volume, by the way: I don't know much about von Eeden but those samples look pretty good to me and as you say, Johnson is an interesting character in terms of American social history as well as boxing, so this is certainly one sports-related comic I'm interested in.
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Post by berkley on Apr 21, 2023 14:14:05 GMT -5
If you do an image search for "Denis Sire" + "race cars", or something along those lines, you'll see some beautiful images that capture not only the aesthetic allure of vintage race car designs but also a vivid sense of motion and speed. But many of them are illustrations rather than sequential art from a comic book or B-D page. Forgot to finish this thought: anyway, I would love to have seen Sire do a real race car comic along the lines of Michel Vaillant or Johnny Comet but as far as I know the closest he came was 6T Melodie which is more like a collection of short stories or vignettes, many of which do feature race cars or motorcycles. But to do the kind of thing I have in mind, he might have needed to work with a writer, as his own work tended to be kind of scattershot.
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Post by tonebone on Apr 21, 2023 14:18:49 GMT -5
I personally can't think of anything I would like to read less than a comic about sports.
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