Forum - View topicBrain Diving - This Sporting Life
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perroloco
Posts: 308 |
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Its not just an issue in the U.S. I think is global, in example here in Mexico the only sport manga ever published SLAM DUNK got canned at volume 15 IIRC, sadly the publisher *Mundo Vid* has been death for like 2 years..
Lets go a little more to the south with Argentina and Editorial IVREA.. Big surprise! Just 2 spo-kon titles have been published there SLAM DUNK and Hungry Heart (From the author of Captain Tsubasa) and while SD did well I think HH didn't did quite so well, otherwise you think IVREA would have bought the license for Captain Tsubasa.. Now in Brazil, the land of soccer!! You would think that Captain Tsubasa would be a big seller, the anime after all was widely popular.. Except its not published there.. In fact Brazil has no Spo-kon titles at all (Unless you'd consider Hikaru No Go a Spo-kon). And finally Spain, it has mixed feelings for Sport manga, lots of Spo-kon have been published there, while some fan-favorites have had poor sales like Captain Tsubasa, Prince of Tennis and Dash Kappei! (Soccer and Tennis not selling in Spain?! With all those soccer clubs and having one of the best Tennis players?!) other favorites have sold well like SLAM DUNK which recently has been re-published in Kanzenban format (Spain LOVES re-editions, specially kanzenbans, oh they really do) and well if I included Hikaru No Go as a Spo-kon might as well include Kinnikuman, which sold pretty good, though it was just released in Catalan. As for the rest of the world.. I don´t really know but from the Spanish speaking countries it seems like Spo-kon its not that loved, even when some titles were VERY popular on TV like Captain Tsubasa and SLAM DUNK. PS: Great article! 
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GATSU
Posts: 15604 |
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Maybe because most people who read comics in the U.S. don't play sports themselves?
See, I liked baseball. But my high school only had concrete where we should've been given a grass field, and when some kid broke his head[Apparently he was alright.] playin' football, they did the 'smart' thing, and banned the sport, rather than give us some green. And the only way to get on the grass was to join a soccer and/or golf team which would have to take effing field trips to other places to [Funny that my alma mater was considered one of the smarter institutions in the district, and yet, unlike other schools, they didn't even have their own f****ing place to keep kids in shape.] I could've played basketball, but I had a bad experience taking an introductory course outside of school where they basically made me practice and join in at random with little to no supervision, which made it that much harder for me to be motivated to continue it. Plus, in elementary school, my peers' idea of getting me involved in the sport was to make me an "announcer". And I pretty much hated most of my peers in HS, especially since they made me look like a loser for daring to join anything, so I would just rot in the sun on the bleachers during break-time. Not sure if that reflects most or other people's experiences, but I'm ironically cool with jocks. I just don't like people who think they know the sport better than you, simply because they're a little better at it physically that they think they have to exclude you from it. They'd probably suck if they were in the big leagues, but they act like they're hot sh*t on the playground. Jocks at least give other potential team-mates a try-out before judging. I don't find myself as interested in The Fighter as Slam Dunk, though.
Thanks for the spoiler. Yeah, I know, and Darth Vader is Luke's father. =p
I think I remember Shigeru Miyamamoto mentioning Star of the Giants.
The irony is I actually suggested to Gutsoon when it was starting up to give out free samples of Baki and Slam Dunk to sporting events.
I'm actually surprised that ES21 has done as well as it has. Though you have to take into account that they used to release it bi-monthly here, so it's not as big as you think. But I guess it's at least doing better than Ultimate Muscle to have gotten this far, the latter of which itself seems to at least make enough money to be finished, too. I'm guessing Prince of Tennis will be the real bench-mark to determine if there's a real market for the genre, because once it's done, Viz will either stop publishing sports manga completely, or continue with that recent sequel.
I'm guessing Whistle benefited from the success of Bend it Like Beckham, possibly Shaolin Soccer, and the manga bubble. So I'm arguing that it'd tank if it were published now. In fact, I think it had one of the longer gaps of any sports manga to be complete its run here, even though it had finished in Japan years earlier.
Well, like I noted earlier, there's a new PoT in Japan. As for Cross Game, I haven't read Adachi's other stuff, but I don't feel like the characters stand out enough in this manga so far. Maybe I'll continue with the next volume when I have the extra $, though.
Um, One Pound Gospel? 
perrolco: Not sure why Europeans and Latin Americans don't read much sports manga. At least we have the excuse of obese kids. Maybe they have the opposite problem? They're too busy playing to keep up? |
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ss-hikaru
 Posts: 269 Location: Western Australia |
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I love sports manga and anime way more than watching sports on TV. In fact, the only sport I'll actually watch is AFL (Australian Football League...which is absolutely nothing like soccer
 )
I really liked Prince of Tennis when I watched it fansubbed many years ago...and I hate tennis. I also loved Giant Killing (please bring the manga over Kodansha USA!!!) and I hate soccer even more than tennis. My absolute favourite though is Eyeshield 21 (which I own the manga of, it was really hard finding volume 9 >.<), and before I watched it on Crunchyroll, I was oblivious to the existence of American Football. My main problem with sports manga is that they tend to be based in highschool. That means that they are usually trying for nationals or some equivalent tournament, where if they lose they're out...so there kinda is no suspense as to the outcome of the game. I guess the fun then is seeing HOW they will win the match, which definitely is the case with Eyeshield  It's fun watching how absolutely ridiculous the special moves get as the manga goes on =P
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Raneth
Posts: 271 |
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I find myself uninterested in sports manga or anime for the same reason I'm uninterested in slice of life manga or anime-it's not enough of an escape, and I thus find it boring. Like you said in the beginning, the reason you got into anime was to find an escape via sci fi and fantasy. I haven't moved out of that stage yet, I suppose.
Maybe as more and more people accept anime and manga in other genres, the sports genre will pick up too. At the moment, though, all the really popular stuff in America still seems to be stuff with sci fi or fantasy elements. |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2695 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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First off, and this is my own opinion, anyone who argues that sports anime & manga doesn't appeal to fans over here simply because the people themselves aren't jocks or actually play a sport is total BS and is just using an easy excuse so that they don't have to actually explain themselves.
Anyway, nice article. While I'm not sure if I was looking for an "escape" like some of you others when I really got into anime, it wasn't hard for me to try out a sports anime since I had already generally loved some Hollywood sports movies. If I already loved movies like The Sandlot, The Replacements, the first two Mighty Ducks movies, etc. then why wouldn't I enjoy watching a sports anime or reading a sports manga? I barely watch sports (the most I generally watch is a Super Bowl here and there, the World Cup if I can catch a match, the Olympics, a Stanley Cup rarely, and usually the X-Games), yet sports anime & manga is one of my favorite genres now. My friend played a little football in school, which made him interested in Eyeshield 21 right away, but in general he loves sports titles as well, even though sports generally do little for him in real life now. I think we watch and read it because it generally is different from other genres, and there's a style and development done in sports anime & manga that you just don't always see in other genres. For example, I generally don't marathon shows that much, but Eyeshield 21 is such an addicting anime that worked so well via marathoning that I just had to watch the first three sets Sentai released over the course of a few days. I read a few volumes of Captain Tsubasa, and one of the best parts of that manga right away was seeing how much Tsubasa loves soccer; his love for it is so pure and genuine that it makes you love to the sport, even if you have little to no interest in it to start with. Prince of Tennis admittedly gets really over-the-top a bit too late into the original series to consider it a real gradual evolution, but it's just a really fun and enjoyable take on tennis. I'm in the middle of Dan Doh!!, a golf anime, and it gives off the exact feel I would want from golf: a slow, methodical pace that works great for developing characters while at the same time delivering enjoyable sports "action", if you can say that golf has action. I think the biggest problem, though, is when it comes to boxing titles. In that sport, there's one anime & manga that is king in a lot of people's minds: Hajime no Ippo. Yes, it's an excellent title and I fully recommend watching or reading it, but Ippo's popularity has seemingly put a dark cloud of blind fanboyism over the entire genre of boxing anime & manga. It's gotten to the point where every single boxing anime & manga seemingly has to be like Ippo or at least be compared to it, solely so that fans of Ippo can insult the other title, call Ippo better and then fully ignore any other title in that genre while blindly wishing for more Ippo to be animated. To as lot of people it seems like no other anime is worth watching or reading as logn as Ippo exists, even though these other titles take a different path as Ippo. Ashita no Joe is a great drama revolving around boxers, One-Pound Gospel is an enjoyable "love dramedy", and Ring ni Kakero 1 is a superb shonen fighting title that uses boxing as its means of battle, but I wouldn't exactly compare them to Ippo as they are all different from each other to the point where comparing them wouldn't exactly be appropriate. Boxing is the only sports genre I see this happen to as well, as I've never seen anyone do this when it comes to any other sports anime & manga, whether it's baseball, soccer, football, rugby, or even board games like mahjong, go, shogi, etc. I've never seen anyone praise a title like Touch or Cross Game while downplaying the quality of a title like Big Windup! or indicate that once you've seen Giant Killing you never have to bother watching another soccer title, even though Captain Tsubasa is definitely worth the watch and/or read. |
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Hardgear
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I also very rarely watch sports, but sports anime is definitely one of my favorite genres. I even love anime/manga about sports I don't particularly like, or ones I don't know anything about (I loved Bamboo Blade, and I don't know ANYTHING about Kendo other than you get to hit people with shinai). I think it is exactly like you and some other reviewers/authors have said: sports anime/manga are more about the people playing the sport than the sport itself. Same goes for American sports movies, I have always liked them for the same reasons I have liked sports anime: great character-driven stories.
I guess I am a bit different in that I don't specifically watch anime or read manga to escape the real world, I do it because I love a good story and the art style. |
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j Talbain
 Posts: 279 Location: Toronto, Ontario |
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I love MMA and have been training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for the last 6 years now. And I would love to be able to purchase Tough, Baki: Son Of Ogre and Garouden Manga here in North America but that is doubtful.
I understand sports Manga just does not sell but I hate trolling around the internet trying to find new issues of any of these Manga. And I don't understand why Tough OVA's and Baki anime has come out here but the manga would not? But it is what it is. |
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crazychild
Posts: 79 |
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I haven't watched many sports anime because I've never really been a fan of sports. Probably the main other reason is just that so many sports series are so long, it's kind of daunting to get into them.
I watched the first 3 Touch movies because I really didn't feel like sitting through a long series. I've been keeping up with Ashita no Joe, but episodes are only subbed once in a blue moon. I enjoyed Aim for the Ace, both the movie and the first series (had to watch the last few episodes dubbed in Spanish and try to figure out what was going on), which I first became interested in because of Gunbuster. Last edited by crazychild on Tue Jan 18, 2011 1:27 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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ssgOverlord
 Posts: 91 |
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Some day I hope to own the Hajime no Ippo manga in English.
Unfortunately that might not ever be possible at this point. I'm happy to own the DVDs of the first season though. |
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GATSU
Posts: 15604 |
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Raneth: I get your point. As for me, out of the sports manga I've read which I like, I like it because they don't take the sport that seriously that I'm bored as hell by it. [Though I dunno if I count Real as a sports manga, or simply as a manga about sports.]
Geo:
Well, we do have a national diabetes problem here, so it's not like I made that shit up. Plus the one manga which should catch on with fan-girls here, PoT, can't even sell enough DVDs for Viz to justify finishing the series. crazychild: I get you there. I only stick with long titles I know I love from the get-go myself. |
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BrianRuh
Posts: 162 Location: West Lafayette, IN, USA |
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You're totally right. I keep forgetting about that one. |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2695 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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That's why it's best to start with shorter series like Big Windup!, Giant Killing, or Ring ni Kakero 1 before going into the giant beasts that are the longer shows. A lot of people seem to immediately talk about the longer shows while kind of, maybe accidentally, not talking enough about the shorter titles. |
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ittoujuu
Posts: 164 Location: SoCal |
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Speaking personally, there are some sports I enjoy playing (American football, badminton, tennis), but even the sports I enjoy playing, I don't have a big interest in watching. This last weekend, I watched a couple complete NFL games for the first time in at least two years. Good games, as luck would have it, but this trend underscores something that I think may be at the heart of why sports manga is unable to tap the potential in the American readership.
As a fan of anime, player of video games, reader of books, aspiring writer, peruser of the internet, gym-goer, daily worker, and more, my life has enough going on that I can't even do all the things I want to do from those categories. Sports, while not something I dislike, just aren't high enough on my totem pole to merit devoting attention to them. Even playing some sports, I've never felt a big, personal connection with them, and I think the "drama" in sports trades on that kind of personal connection in ways other stories don't - or perhaps, in ways other genres don't expect they'd be able to. Why is a sports drama a sports drama, and not just a human interest story? Because the writer/artist felt that sports was an important device for dramatic delivery. But how much greater the amplification if, say, you came from a family where your father and your grandfather were fans of a certain team, and took you to games as a child, and you grew up in that environment, rather than if you were a child who didn't have any particular abiding interest in sports, and weren't involved in activities that laid down the memories that would become tomorrow's sweet nostalgia. Sports anime and manga trades on this kind of familiarity. In the same way that anime and manga set in schools is so prevalent because that's a shared experience most readers will have had, sports anime and manga works because lots of Japanese people played a sport in school, or were part of a sports club, or at least follow a sport. That's not an assumption that carries over to manga and anime's readership in America. It IS an assumption that could carry over to Americans in general, but the crossover between those interested in sports drama and those interested in comic books would seem, to me, to be a venn diagram of lean overlap. Another thing to keep in mind is that not all "sports fans" are going to be receptive to sports drama - doubly so when presented in the form of a black-and-white comic book, or featuring an all-Japanese cast. Some very compelling narratives may indeed be taking place in the sports genre, but if I and other fans have difficulty latching onto the drama because of a general disconnect from (and perhaps disinterest in) sports, it's almost like these manga are working at cross-purposes to a large share of existing fans. If that's the case, then as Brian implied, the main way for sports manga to succeed is simply to grow into new readerships - ones that have the cache of sports-related memories and experiences for the stories to mean something more to them. It's not that without those experiences, the stories are lessened, it's that I think they must be greatly amplified by having that kind of personal history to draw on, if one has it. |
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DerekTheRed
 Posts: 3544 Location: ::Points to hand:: |
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Yeah, I think the whole, "you have to like/play the sport top like the anime/manga" is nonsense.
The only sports I like are hockey (20 years and still playing), lacrosse (played in HS, but I sucked) and rugby (wish I had played, but never did) . I dislike soccer (played as a youngster), baseball (played until middle school), basketball (I suck) and football (never played). Seeing as there is basically no anime/manga about the sports that I like, by that logic, I shouldn't like sports anime. But Touch rests at the top of my top 10 list, in the company of Fighting Spirit/Hajime no Ippo and they will soon be joined by Cross Game.
I don't think this is a good reason either. Wouldn't you agree that the majority of the people who read X-Men are not super-powered mutant crime fighters? I honestly can't think of any reason that anime/manga fans would be any less interested in sports than the rest of the population. As a matter of fact, I would say that most of the people who post in the Community Forum here have talked about at least one sport in the sports thread there. |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2695 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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ittoujuu, why do keep saying sports drama? Are you simply talking about sports titles that are heavy with drama, or are you indicating that you think all sports anime & manga are dramas? I couldn't get any sort of indication from your post, though it was nicely done.
People love to talk about the sports dramas but not every sports title is a drama. Titles like Captain Tsubasa, Ring ni Kakero 1, Prince of Tennis, Eyeshield 21, and Hajime no Ippo are what I would necessarily call "dramas", though Ippo definitely has some elements of drama in it. But outside of Ippo people tend to downplay these sports titles that aren't dramas but instead are more action-oriented, and in the case of PoT, Eyeshield, and RnK1 more often than not insult them for not being realistic enough and instead are more over-the-top in their handling. I personally can't understand that kind of thinking, as they're different ways of handling something. If anything, I think part of the reason why sports anime haven't really caught on over here is because there isn't really a title that "everyone" can agree on, and because of that it's hard to tell just exactly what people want from a sports anime & manga over here. The majority of people who want a focus on heavy character development and drama see the more action-heavy titles are being inferior and unrealistic, while some of those who might prefer there to be more action might not like the slower, more methodical pace of the sports dramas. You could say that Hajime no Ippo was a title that could have linked the two together, but it's long length, which made people hesitant to buy it (especially though singles), combined with some of its humor stylings (let's face it, not everyone likes penis jokes) just wasn't going to grab the people it should have, no matter how excellent of a title it is. Me? I can go with either style of sports title, and I'm sure I'm nowhere near alone on this, but we just might not be enough of an audience to support it ourselves. Now I do hope that we keep seeing sports animes and manga getting licensed rather than see companies decide that it's just not worth their time, but this is just how I see it. |
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