The Spring 2017 Manga Guide

Toppu GP Vol. 1

What's It About? 

Toppu Uno would rather build his Gundam models or watch his friend Myne race than race himself. But his ability to learn something from simply watching it – especially when it comes to Myne – makes him an excellent candidate for motorbike racing himself. Without even realizing what's going on, Toppu finds himself in a race one day, and thanks to his special skill, Myne and his dad are proven right: Toppu is, in fact, a natural. With their encouragement (and the occasional bribe from Myne), Toppu starts to become a more serious racer. Of course, with that comes its own issues, such as the jealousy of every male rider who envies his relationship with Myne, but also a pair of brothers who will do anything to try to put him at a disadvantage. But more importantly, watching Myne ride, Toppu has to ask himself if he's really racing for the right reasons – is he doing it because, like Myne, he loves it? Or is he just following along? Toppu GP is an original manga by Kosuke Fujishima. It was published by Kodansha USA in April and retails for $12.99.

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating: 3 

I'm much more into classic cars than motorcycles or racing of any kind, but Kosuke Fujishima (of Oh My Goddess! fame) is a good enough mangaka that he can make me care about almost anything. In part that's due to his art – like his previous works, Toppu GP is gorgeous in more ways than one. Of course there's his flair for cute girls; heroine Myne is attractive in a girl-next-door kind of way but also gives the impression of being incredibly strong, both internally and externally. But the real stars of the show are the motorbikes themselves, which are detailed to a truly impressive degree. You can almost hear them as they zoom around the track, and when Toppu's bike is weighted due to the machinations of the immature Nimi brothers, you can tell that he's having a harder time controlling it due to the way Fujishima draws the bike's movements and Toppu's body language. If you're a fan of motorcycle racing, the bikes alone make this worth your time.

The story itself is also interesting, albeit still comfortably within the confines of sports manga. Toppu, who looks to be in sixth grade or so, enjoys watching his “big sister” (one scene implies that they're neighbors, not siblings) race her bike, but when it comes to himself, he'd rather build models. Naturally his talent lies in racing, so he ends up killing it on the track. Where the story veers off the beaten path is that even though he's good at it and to a degree enjoys the challenge of trying to figure out how to best use what he's learned from Myne on his own very different machine, he's actually not sure he's having the same kind of fun Myne is. In fact, he's not sure it's fun at all, and the way his face is drawn behind his helmet's visor certainly seems to indicate that the whole thing is more stressful for him than anything. Whether or not he learns to love it remains to be seen, but it would be an interesting twist if he eventually simply gave it up as a statement that being good at something does not translate into automatic love of it.

Of course, it looks like Myne might be behind even his ambivalence about the sport. There's a scene in the last chapter where she, incensed at the dirty tactics of the Nimi brothers, allows her anger to turn her into a vengeful demon. Not only is the art for this incredible (and a departure from Fujishima's norm), but it also seems to recall an incident that Toppu would rather forget, one that was obliquely referenced back in chapter one as well. Did Myne do something to a younger Toppu that traumatized him? Or did he just see her do something awful, like force another rider to fall and injure themselves? It's a question that's going to have to be answered going forward, and I hope that future volumes can balance character and plot with racing just a bit better than this one does. That's really my only big complaint – the racing gets more time than the people, which makes it feel a little patchy as far as story flow goes. It's good enough anyway to merit checking out volume two.

Nik Freeman

Rating: 2.5

Toppu GP is pretty standard fare for a sports manga, featuring a naturally gifted rookie protagonist and exaggerated imagery. There's one scene where a character is imagined as a katana-wielding Ghost Rider-like figure, but even when motorcycle races are more realistically depicted, they're creative and fun. The manga discusses technical aspects like weight and engine power and how they impact races in easy-to-understand terms while also making each race feel distinct from those around it. Race sequences are flashy and intense, and include just the right amount of detail when breaking down the latest technique that Toppu utilizes to gain an edge.

What holds Toppu GP back is that it is completely lacking in any interesting or relatable characters. Toppu is a bizarre protagonist whose mind works in strange ways. He's seemingly a racing savant, able to time Myne's performance down to the closest hundredth of a second and also to recreate any technique simply by observing it. The only challenge he faces in the first volume is compensating for the fact that he and Myne have different body weights and ride different types of bikes, so he can't simply rely on copying her. To explain this very easy to understand concept, he thinks of it in terms of a metaphor involving building Gundam models that is far, far more difficult to comprehend than the issue at hand. On top of this, he's a pretty moody and immature kid throughout the volume, only getting involved in motorcycle races to satisfy his crush. Myne herself is transparently a tool of the plot, present merely to serve as Toppu's muse, which is immediately obvious from the manga's opening pages which all but say outright that she dies young and leaves Toppu to follow in her footsteps. She's so unrealistically perfect that already she comes off more as Toppu's idealized memory of her than an actual person.

When I first read this manga, I was going to give it a higher rating. It was an easy read with decent art and a bunch of motorcycle races, and its negative qualities weren't especially glaring. After finishing reading the volume, I put it away, and went on to a few other series before going to bed. The next day, I had completely forgotten that I had read Toppu GP. It had left so little impact that I simply put it out of my mind as soon as I was done reading it. The series gave me nothing big to think about, no pros and cons to weigh, no mixed feelings to sort out. I simply thought, “That was okay,” and was done. Nothing about it is remarkably good nor bad. It is a competently created, phenomenally average manga.

Amy McNulty

Rating: 1.5

Despite Kosuke Fujishima's previous successes, the one thing Toppu GP has going for it are the highly detailed drawings of minibikes. Unfortunately, even those are minimally exciting since the rider-on-a-bike shots blend so much from one panel to the next. Just as the audience might feel watching racers go round and round on a defined lap, there's little to distinguish one racing panel from the next. The backgrounds are minimal and at times too reliant on screentones. Since the racers are confined to a track and aren't exploring the greater countryside, that makes sense—but it still doesn't make for a compelling manga on the page. Toppu GP follows fairly standard shonen sports tropes, although the hero of the piece, Toppu Uno, is more reluctant than gung-ho. There's also a supportive heroine, Myne Arai. She's a more skilled racer than the hero at first, which might shake up the formula somewhat, but almost her entire role in this first volume is simply to cheer and prod Toppu on, as she sees the potential in what he can be. There's some rivalry in this volume, too, when a driver jealous of Toppu's natural talent and of the attention Myne is paying to Toppu insists he affix weights to his bike to even out the field—but whether or not that rival will become someone who contests Toppu every step of the way remains to be seen. Toppu GP both embraces conventional sports manga tropes and fails to develop them adeptly thus far.

If there's one area where Fujishima's art does stand out, besides the loving detail he clearly puts into the bikes themselves, it's in those moments when Toppu, Myne, or other drivers are really picking up speed. The art takes on a shaky quality as the tension builds, almost as if a photograph taken of a vehicle in rapid movement. However, even the best effects don't make a difference when the reader is thrown into Toppu's origins as a great racer without much introduction to anyone outside of the track. These characters live, eat, and breathe racing—even Toppu, who only races to get Myne to buy him plastic models at first. The few scenes off the track are decidedly brief and consist of almost nothing but characters thinking about racing. Like the races on its pages, Toppu GP is a fast-paced, light read suitable for pretty much any age. Whether or not sports manga—particularly solo sports, where teambuilding is less important—interests you will decide whether or not you want to pick up this volume, but even then, it'll take you on a rather shallow ride in its first time around the track.