Playing the Long Game - The Story of Slam Dunk in North America

Just before I flew out to D.C. for Otakon last year, I started hearing a low but persistent rumbling around a little movie about to hit theaters—The First Slam Dunk. While I missed my chance to see the film on the big screen, the original manga that spawned it piqued my curiosity. Six months later, I popped open the first volume and started to understand why Takehiko Inoue's Slam Dunk is one of the greatest stories ever inked.

What started as the story of a punk who joined the basketball team to impress a girl quickly became a worldwide phenomenon when it hit the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump in October 1990. As previously reported by Yahoo Sports Canada's Alex Wong and Crunchyroll's Tim Lyu, Slam Dunk served as Asia's grand introduction to the world of basketball. While the series has continued to be a Japanese bestseller in the years following its initial run, The First Slam Dunk's runaway success cemented it as the sixth best-selling manga of 2023. Not to mention that the series is the only complete entry on that list and quite an old one.

However, there's a reason I've referred only to the series' success in Japan and all across Asia—Slam Dunk has had a tough time breaking through in North America. For the past twenty years, the boys of Shohoku have been underdogs in the face of a market that isn't particularly taken with sports fiction.

As I finished reading Viz Media's release of the series, more than a few questions started swirling in my brain.

Why do Slam Dunk and other sports series struggle so much? What's the deal with these random Raijin Comics volumes I'm seeing? And wait a second, is that the same Kelly Sue DeConnick who wrote Captain Marvel?

In light of The First Slam Dunk's North American Blu-ray release, I am hungry to answer those questions. To do just that, I set about reviewing the series' highlights alongside some of the professionals who brought this classic to stateside—Jonathan “Jake” Tarbox, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Mike Montesa, and Steven “Stan!” Brown.

Not content to stop there, I spoke with MediaOCD's Justin Sevakis and Denpa's Ed Chavez. Both are intimately familiar with the hurdles faced by sports anime and manga in this part of the globe.

Full Disclosure: Coop regularly works with Sevakis and MediaOCD. His opinions given here are purely his own and do not reflect those of his employers.

This is how Takehiko Inoue's Slam Dunk played the long game in North America.

The First Quarter - Raijin Comics and the Best Starting Lineup of Manga

Way before Viz Media had their shot at Slam Dunk, another publisher brought the series stateside in the most ambitious way possible—the pages of a weekly magazine. Raijin Comics was the North American sister magazine to Japan's Weekly Comics Bunch. Both publications were run by COAMIX, a manga and anime production company founded in 2000 by former Shonen Jump editor-in-chief Nobuhiko Horie, City Hunter creator Tsukasa Hōjō, and Fist of the North Star co-creator Tetsuo Hara. In the case of Raijin Comics specifically, the founders handed the reins to Gutsoon! Entertainment, a U.S. subsidiary of COAMIX at the time.

As they prepared to start up the Raijin Comics project, COAMIX approached Jonathan “Jake” Tarbox to get the ball rolling. An American expat working in Japan's media entertainment industry since '95, Tarbox was brought on as the publication's senior editor and project manager. He was responsible for ensuring that Raijin's titles were properly translated, lettered, proofread, and ready for printing. Looking back at those early days, Tarbox kindly filled me in on the market conditions that led to Raijin's inception and initial publication in 2002.

“In the '80s and '90s in America (and the rest of the world), a fan base for anime and manga had quietly been building. Dark Horse, Tokyopop, Viz Media, and Central Park Media have been publishing manga and growing the market. In the year 2002, several things came to a head. Tokyopop decided to start printing manga in English in the original right-to-left format. At almost the same time, COAMIX, the Japanese manga publisher, had been considering several different ventures and decided to try to plunge into the English language market. Nobuhiko Horie, the president of COAMIX, thought that the way for American readers to get the most authentic experience was to read it in the weekly magazine format in right-to-left format, just like Japanese readers. So, he decided to create a weekly manga magazine Raijin Comics for the American market. As a direct response, Shueisha directed Viz Media to start up the English-language edition of Shonen Jump magazine.”

Naturally, this sparked a tense rivalry between the Jump and Raijin teams. In the ninetieth installment of his House of 1000 Manga column, Jump launch editor Jason Thompson chronicled the rise and fall of Raijin Comics while providing insights into VIZ's side of the rivalry. In the column, Thompson noted that City Hunter, Fist of the North Star, and Slam Dunk were Raijin's “Big Three” titles. Given Hojo and Hara's respective roles within COAMIX, their titles were a natural choice for the publication. However, the inclusion of Slam Dunk resulted from Horie's days at Shueisha, where he built a strong rapport with Inoue. According to Tarbox, Horie forged many tight-knit relationships with creators during that time, and those bonds eventually became the engine behind most titles included in Bunch and Raijin. In Inoue's case, it didn't hurt that he'd worked closely with Hojo either.

“Takehiko Inoue was an assistant on City Hunter, and Horie gave him a chance to helm his own title with Slam Dunk. When negotiating to get English reprint rights to Slam Dunk, Inoue told Horie that he would have given him Vagabond as well, but VIZ had taken it just a few weeks earlier.”

Just like that, Slam Dunk joined the likes of Baki The Grappler and Fist of the Blue Sky in the weekly pages of Raijin Comics. With titles in place, Tarbox and the company needed to put together a team capable of handling the intense demands that came with operating a weekly publication.

“In editorial, Sam Kondo and I were the team. Sam was excellent. He worked as hard as anybody on the team and did a great job. If I were working on a project like this again, he is the first person I would try to hire. The rest of our team were freelancers, and they were great, too. Tony Ogasawara was a successful business and advertising translator who we hooked up with. The business world paid him four times as much as we did; he just translated for fun. The real star on our freelance team was Sheldon Drzka. He was an amazing translator. He got the voices, the tone, the nuances down. He has also worked with VIZ and Tokyopop.”

I'd been familiar with Sheldon Drzka in passing, as we have both worked for MediaOCD. When I reached out to him, Drzka mentioned that he got his start in the industry at Raijin Comics. He primarily worked on City Hunter and Fist of the Blue Sky but occasionally came in as a pinch hitter for other projects. While Drzka wasn't completely sure of his involvement, he recalled that he might have been called in to wrap up a chapter or two of Slam Dunk during his tenure at the company.

Once Raijin Comics started its publication at the end of 2002, Tarbox said that the team regularly burnt the midnight oil to meet their brutal deadlines.

“Sam Kondo and I had to get 200-300 pages ready for print every week. We were often working 70-hour work weeks. In Tokyo, the commuter trains stop running a little after midnight and start running again at about 5:30 am. There were many times when I worked all night and took the first-morning train home. Once, I took the second train home because I worked past the first train. The magazine business's main constraint is that you must make the weekly deadline.”

Luckily for Tarbox and the company, preparing titles for collected volumes (or tankobon) tended to be a little less stressful.

“For our magazine titles, we simply took the localized material and repurposed it for the tankobons. We had to add a few extra pages, such as credits and content but that wasn't much. When you create tankobon alone, there is much less deadline pressure. If a book doesn't get released on time and pushed back a week or two, it's not much of a problem. But with a magazine, the deadline is everything.”

In June 2003, Raijin released their first collected volume of Slam Dunk in comic shops and bookstores across North America. The next three volumes were released bimonthly—in August, October, and December. However, the main Raijin Comics magazine had shifted to a monthly format by volume five's release in April 2004. It ended up being Raijin's last volume of Slam Dunk before the magazine's abrupt end in July 2004. Tarbox mentioned that the team had managed to work through a few more chapters of Slam Dunk before things fell apart, but the situation weighed more heavily on his mind at the time.

“Pulling the plug came as a total surprise to me. I had no idea it was coming. We were in the middle of a bunch of projects. Afterward, I was in a daze, as I wasn't sure what the future held.”

Not long after, Tarbox took a job with DC Comics' CMX imprint and freelanced in the following years. Despite the rough waters he had to navigate as the Raijin ship sank, Tarbox said he's still immensely proud of his time there.

“I am very proud of the work I did with Sam Kondo, Shel Drzka, and the other members of the Raijin team. I think we did our best on Slam Dunk. Working on Slam Dunk, City Hunter, Fist of the North Star, and Baki The Grappler were some of the highlights of my life. I wish Raijin Comics had worked out better on the business side, and that we could have kept doing it for many more years.”

The Second Quarter - Overpriced DVDs and the Sports Problem

Just as Raijin's volumes started settling into the shelves of comic shops and used bookstores, Toei Animation set its sights on bringing the Slam Dunk anime to North America. On November 11th 2004, Toei inked a distribution deal with Geneon Entertainment to release titles such as Slam Dunk, Air Master, and Interlude on home video. With a release date of March 15th 2005 set for Slam Dunk's initial pair of DVDs, Toronto-based Kaleidoscope Entertainment set about dubbing the series into English. However, only twenty episodes of this dub saw the light of day.

Volumes five and six of Slam Dunk were solicited to hit stores following volume four's June 14th, 2005 release, but truly abysmal sales ended those plans. Over a year later, Geneon formally announced the cancellation of those volumes alongside most of the titles they'd agreed to distribute for Toei. According to details assembled by the Lost Media Wiki, it is rumored that Kaleidoscope had dubbed most of Slam Dunk before the DVDs were canceled. But outside of listings on the resumes of a casting director and a supposed cast member, no further details have ever been confirmed.

Curious to figure out why Toei's Slam Dunk DVDs sold in the double digits, I reached out to a colleague who's all too familiar with what it takes to sell a disc or two—MediaOCD CEO and Anime News Network founder, Justin Sevakis.

On a product level, Sevakis said that Slam Dunk's English subtitles were not only awful but ran off the screen in many instances—an issue that also plagued Air Master's DVDs. It didn't help either that the value proposition for each disc broke down to $25 for four episodes. In the case of a 101-episode series like Slam Dunk, that sales strategy led Sevakis to say, “What are you doing, buddy?” However, he seemed most convinced that Toei and Geneon pushed the product through without a clear picture of the U.S. anime market.

Having previously addressed the topic in a 2018 Answerman article, Sevakis said that sports titles tend to bomb unless something is spicing it up a bit—be it hunky boys, sexy ladies, or a touch of the fantastical. This is because most Westerners (primarily Americans) prefer to watch actual games over sports fiction. In recent years, Sevakis has noticed that sports titles such as Hajime no Ippo (A Discotek Media title) and Kuroko's Basketball have found their niche audiences, but plenty of series still bomb. When the topic of BLUE LOCK's success came up, he asserted that the title is still in its early days. He believes sports titles still need extra spice to be pushed over the edge. However, Sevakis noted a key factor has changed thanks to the growth of anime in the mainstream—the divide between nerds and jocks is nowhere near as deep as it used to be.

When looking at Slam Dunk through this market lens, Sevakis noted a lack of that special spice. He specifically mentioned the series' realistic and occasionally mundane tone, along with the lack of any real lookers among Shohoku's roster. On top of that, Sevakis continued to point out that the Yanki vibes of the series lead, Hanamichi Sakuragi, don't exactly appeal to Western viewers. He chalked that particular observation up to the marketing challenges faced by delinquent-focused titles—challenges not dissimilar from the ones faced by sports titles. After our conversation, I realized that Yanki-adjacent series like JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and Tokyo Revengers managed to avoid the bargain bin thanks to that same “spice” he spoke of.

However, these market hurdles are not limited to sports anime alone; things have been historically dicey on the manga side of things. For additional context on the situation, I reached out to Ed Chavez, publisher at Denpa. Chavez isn't sure why sports manga is such a hard sell in North America, but his industry experience has led him to a few conclusions. “To be completely honest, I have no clue [why sports titles struggle stateside]. I do not believe anyone has made a proper survey as to why this has been the case. However, there have been exceptions. Briefly, titles like Prince of Tennis and Crimson Hero did quite well (back in the mid-00s). More recently, Kuroko's Basketball and Haikyu!! appeared to do nicely. And I have read that BLUE LOCK was a very strong seller for Kodansha USA.

But historically, the genre has not hit the heights it experienced in Japan. Artists like Mitsuru Adachi (we'll [Denpa] be publishing his baseball anthology Short Game later this year) have not been the award winners or major sellers that they are in Japan. We do not see many sports titles localized outside of a few Jump titles. Still, that is not to say publishers are not trying. We do see a few every year.

My take on this topic has changed over the years. For many years, I felt that the market as a whole was just not mature enough. Sports fans for the longest time were not specifically comics readers, let alone manga readers. So the Venn diagram was very slim between those two audiences. In the 00s and 10s, most sports manga titles were also too fantastic which took readers away from the sport itself. Sports are great dramas on their own, so there was no real need for characters with superhuman abilities or personalities.

Meanwhile, a title like Slam Dunk which is a very subtle sports romance-comedy set in high school, was a bit too far removed from the drama of the NBA or even March Madness.

As manga became more mainstream, sports titles also began to get more recognition, but generally speaking, the increased attention mainly focused on current titles and very often works that appeal to a broader audience. Not the very nichey readerships/fandoms of very inside baseball works, pardon the pun, like Giant Killing (J-League soccer), Gurazeni (Japanese baseball) or Capeta (kart racing and Formula 3 racing).”

Looking back at the earliest days of manga in North America, Chavez said that sportsbooks have always faced these hurdles. Even with a handful of vocal fans around to champion their favorites.

“They [sports titles] rarely existed in the 80's and 90's and many struggled to finish until the launch of Viz's Shonen Jump imprint. Other publishers would consistently get requests for sports titles, but despite the vocal outpour many sports titles would have a hard time finding viable customer bases.”

With Denpa's release of Mitsuru Adachi's Short Game on the way, I wondered how Chavez approaches sports titles from a publisher's perspective.

“I take them on with a pragmatic attitude. My expectations are relatively low. I also try to focus on short titles, if not one-shots. Many sports works also happen to be long, which does not help either. Longer works are harder to shelve in the West where manga shelves until recently were at a premium in brick-and-mortar stores.
I haven't worked on a sports title in years. So the results were not great. But we will be working on another one later this year.
It's a one-volume anthology. We picked one of the legends in the field. We will give it better than normal production values to see if collectors will give it a shot. And if it works out, we hope to dig deeper into that author's catalog as he has a few more short works.
I hope that it does well as he deserves the recognition.”

And while more people are reading manga as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Chavez isn't convinced that the temperature around sports titles has changed much in the past five years.

“I don't think the pandemic did anything for the genre. Manga generally got a nice bump for a couple of years, but those numbers have pulled back and stabilized. The market is bigger than before the pandemic which is a positive but the changes started to happen before that. Slowly but surely as manga is just becoming more mainstream sports manga are accepted more and more.

That said, it is a slow process. I can't see every sports title instantly clicking. Most manga titles don't (most sales still tend to come from Jump). And without a lot of marketing, media mix support and word of mouth sports manga, like josei manga, like classical manga, like indie manga, like... may continue to confound fans and publishers alike.”

As firmly established in my conversations with Chavez and Sevakis, Slam Dunk faces the same challenges any sports title does in North America. But that doesn't mean the classic lost its chance to shine—especially back in 2008.

The Third Quarter - Viz Media Picks Up the Ball

Just as Toei and Geneon's last DVDs hit retailers, Viz Media made a small passing comment in the first issue of Shojo Beat—the Slam Dunk manga is coming soon. Roughly two years later, VIZ confirmed at SDCC 2007 that the iconic series would make a (later revealed to be full-color) debut in the pages of Shonen Jump's December issue. Additionally, they announced that collected volumes were heading to stores in 2008.

With Slam Dunk's North American return ahead of them, Viz Media got busy assembling a new starting lineup to hit the localization court—Joe Yamazaki on translation, James Gaubatz on touch-ups and lettering, Sean Lee with the classic Shonen Jump cover design, Kit Fox on editing (with Urian Brown working alongside him on volume one), and Kelly Sue DeConnick handing the English adaptation.

There's a good handful of names on that list, but DeConnick's name should ring a bell right away for folks who know a thing or two about American comics. Before she became known for redefining Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel in 2012, DeConnick wrote comics and adapted manga from her home office in Kansas City, Missouri. Some of the titles she worked on include Fruits Basket for Tokyopop and Black Cat for Viz Media, the latter of which Jonathan Tarbox served as an editor.

By the time Slam Dunk rolled around, DeConnick had already built a strong working relationship with Yamazaki and Fox. Their rapport allowed her to smoothly and swiftly move into the project, undaunted by the title's status as a worldwide phenomenon.

“I wasn't particularly shaken by the importance of the work—I took the job very seriously, regardless of how well-known the book was. The only thing I remember scaring me was that I knew next to nothing about basketball! I did a bit of cramming and got friends—I remember hitting up Han Q. Duong in particular—to explain things and coach me a bit.” When asked if she or any of her colleagues perused Raijin's volumes as the project spun up, DeConnick made it clear that the team focused on their work and their work alone. With the spotlight firmly on her team's work, DeConnick detailed her approach to adaptation.

“My adaptation process is to read through the translation, ask the translator any questions I think they might be able to help me with, research any cultural references that I suspect I'm missing context for, and then revise the translation just enough to make the dialogue feel natural and character-specific in English. The goal is to make the reader forget you're reading in translation but to stay true to what you intuit as the author's intent. I don't owe any allegiance to anyone but the author and my editor.”

Following Slam Dunk's aforementioned debut and a Comic-Con announcement that it would be eventually leaving the Shonen Jump magazine, Viz Media's first volume of the series hit bookstores in September 2008. As part of the launch, the company partnered with the NBA and Greg Oden of the Portland Trail Blazers (and later, the Miami Heat) in a campaign to promote childhood literacy. Additionally, Slam Dunk's initial volumes featured full-color spreads featuring NBA superstars such as LeBron James and Steve Nash alongside a handful of basketball facts. Despite still being listed in the table of contents, the NBA content has been removed from recent reprints.

As things around the initial launch winded down, the team continued to dribble away on the series. About a year and a half later, Kit Fox left Viz Media and passed the editor baton to Mike Montesa in July 2010. However, Montesa said he'd been involved with the project a good while before he received his first editing credit—on volume thirteen in December 2010.

“The way our workflows were set up back then, I had probably been working on it [Slam Dunk] from around the end of 2009. I took over from Kit Fox after he left VIZ that year, so I might have shepherded Vol. 12 or even Vol. 11 out the door even though I didn't edit those volumes. I would have had my hands on the series already, before 2010.

Despite having been at VIZ for three years at that point, I was still new-ish. 2006-2010 were boom and bust years for us, and the Editorial department had grown and shrunk. I think I knew what I was doing enough to do the job. Of course, 14 years later I look back and think of things I would have done differently, in terms of editing, but that's the benefit of hindsight.”

A senior editor at VIZ today, Montesa said that jumping in to work on an ongoing series is difficult despite being a commonplace industry practice. When brought in to work on Slam Dunk, Montesa admitted that he only had a passing familiarity with the series. But as he continued to work away, it became more than an assignment.

“I lived in Japan throughout the 90s and into the early aughts, and especially during the time of its [Slam Dunk] initial run, its influence was everywhere. Basketball and the NBA became a phenomenon in Japan, and Slam Dunk's massive popularity sparked a lot of interest. But, I am not a basketball fan so I didn't pay attention to it. The fact that people like me still knew of it shows how much impact it had.

So when I came to the series, in all honesty, it was just another series I had been assigned to edit. Of course, I would apply myself as much as on any other series I worked on, but I had no special attraction to Slam Dunk. That would most definitely change.

It was difficult to just jump in halfway. I had to read through the existing volumes, which I did quickly to get the story and characters in my head. But once I started editing the scripts and getting deeper into it, I came to love it. Takehiko Inoue's writing was incredible. The pacing, plot, characters, everything was just really, really good.”

When I asked Montesa about his further experiences working in this transitional period, I was surprised to learn that he didn't work alongside DeConnick.

“Since I took over the series from Kit Fox, he had already edited the scripts that Kelly did the rewrite on, so I never actually worked with her.”

Viz Media released DeConnick's last volume on the series, volume sixteen, in June 2011. She couldn't recall exactly why she left the project but suspected that the development of her initial Captain Marvel run to be the cause. Even though she stepped away from manga, DeConnick said she came away with a confidence that pushed her higher, further, and faster into the rest of her career.

“Working on more than 11k pages of manga adaptations was an incredible education and boot camp. I learned the discipline of trying to communicate character, tone, and intention as simply as possible; I developed a preference for a few of the hallmarks of manga that are less common in OEL [original English-language] comics—for instance, I hate off-panel balloon tails. I think I developed that distaste from working with manga because Japanese comics proved that tailless balloons were just as effective. I also love and regularly use balloons that only contain punctuation—again something much more common in manga than in American comics.”

While reflecting on her time with the series, DeConnick quickly pointed back to Inoue himself. Those feelings have only become stronger for her now that she's shared the experience of having her work presented in new languages.

“I hope I was helpful to English-speaking audiences and did Inoue justice...

But it is the classic it is because Takehiko Inoue made a classic.

As someone who also sits on the other side of the table—Pretty Deadly and Bitch Planet have both been published in translation all over the world, as has my DC and Marvel work—I mostly just feel honored to have been trusted with this opportunity.”

With DeConnick's departure, the Slam Dunk team needed a new adaptive writer. This change-up allowed Montesa to bring on an old friend he'd made while playing tabletop games in Japan—Steven “Stan!” Brown. Brown told me about the club that brought them together in 1992.

“I co-founded and was running an organization for English-speaking tabletop game players called JIGG. I co-founded it with a couple of other folks who are game players and one of them is Mike Montesa. We were board and tabletop role-playing gamers in Japan who couldn't find anyone else to game with. The main thing I wanted was a list of people I could call. And that turned into an actual organization, which continues to serve that purpose to this day.”

After a while teaching English, Brown returned to the States to professionally pursue his passion for tabletop gaming.

“I went to work for a company called West End Games, doing Star Wars role-playing games and other games like that. I got Mike to do a little freelance for me there. I wound up working for TSR, the company that created Dungeons and Dragons.”

As Brown became more tenured in the industry, he brought Montesa in to do a little freelance work from time to time. Once he'd returned to the States himself, Montesa saw fit to return the favor, starting with something of a “master quest.” “The Legend of Zelda [Ocarina of Time] was the first series I did with him [Brown], starting around 2008. He's done rewrites for dozens of series we've [Viz Media] published since then.”

At first, Brown did this extra bit of work on the side while working as a manager at Upper Deck Entertainment. Around the time he was brought on to adapt Slam Dunk, Brown mentioned that things were starting to look dicey at his day job—naturally 1 dicey.

“I don't remember whether I was still at Upper Deck, but they started going through layoffs. So I went back into the freelance pool full time. At which point, I said, 'Mike, anything you got for me, I'll do.' So I may have been already on it. Or that might have happened shortly after I went back to freelance.”

From there, it was off to the races as Brown quickly started work on Slam Dunk's seventeenth volume ahead of its August 2011 release. The situation didn't provide him enough time to review the previous volumes, but Brown felt confident that Yamazaki and Montesa could answer his questions. With Yamazaki's continued presence as the series' translator, Brown said he wasn't concerned with any noticeable style differences that might have arrived when he joined the project.

“I think that would be a bigger worry if the translator had switched at the same time. You get significantly different styles out of different translators. They're all good and what they're saying is correct, but there is style involved. I don't know if it's true, but it's certainly possible that you can tell that I made some stylistic changes after reading the books I wrote. But they were lessened by the fact that I was working with a brilliant translator.”

It greatly helped that Brown and Yamazaki worked alongside an editor who fell in love with his work. As Montesa told me, “Once I had a firm grasp on the story and characters, I loved it. When you're editing, it's different from reading for enjoyment. It takes a lot longer. You're looking hard at the text, the FX, the layout, and a bunch of different, very granular things. Sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees. But Slam Dunk always managed to lift my view enough so that I was both editing it and reading it for enjoyment.”

With a long and hard-fought set of ball games wrapped up in the series' conclusion, Yamazaki, Montesa, Brown and the rest of the VIZ team said goodbye to Slam Dunk when its thirty-first (and final) volume hit stores in December 2013.

Over a decade following the series' North American conclusion, Brown mentioned that he's often blindsided when asked about his manga work.

“It's weird when you do the kind of work I do. On a lot of things, you're not the upfront face, you're not the creator. In this case, I'm not the creative of ideas, I'm helping to interpret someone else's work. I've done over 200 volumes of manga at this point, and this is the third interview I've ever done about it in the last 18 years. And it will shock me when someone will say, 'Hey, are you the Stan! that did this' and I'm like 'someone read the credits?!'”

Similarly to DeConnick, Brown reiterated that he was a vessel to get Inoue's classic out there, not the focus. At the same time, Brown is proud to have been a small part of the chain of folks responsible for the series' North American legacy. As for Montesa, Slam Dunk will forever be an all-time favorite.

“I think it's one of the best manga series ever written. I recommend it without reservation when people ask me what my favorites are. I think Slam Dunk drove the point home for me that when the story is good, the characters feel like real people, the art connects to and compliments that story, it doesn't matter that it was about basketball. It was just plain good.”

And while she's been away from the basketball court for a long time, DeConnick occasionally reunites with the Shohoku boys.

“There's a crepe kiosk at a shopping mall near us that my daughter likes. They have statues of all the main Slam Dunk characters behind the counter. Walking by always makes me smile.”

The Fourth Quarter - The First Slam Dunk and the Game in Progress

Despite becoming one of his all-time favorites, Montesa admitted to Yahoo Sports Canada in 2019 that Slam Dunk hadn't exactly been a bestseller for Viz Media—referring back to the aforementioned sports hurdle established earlier. With that, the series remained on the shelves of bookstores for new readers to discover and fall in love with. Shelves specifically, as Inoue is known for not being the biggest fan of digital manga. In a 2014 interview with Akira creator Katsuhiro Ōtomo, Inoue elaborated on his stance.

“Manga has always been drawn under the assumption that they would be made into printed books, so you can't turn them into e-books just like that. The situation in Europe is such that it's hard for manga to catch on unless it's in e-book form, so I feel that it's a problem I may need to deal with. I'd like to think about what things e-books could allow me to do.”

While Slam Dunk and Vagabond remain print-only titles, it seems that Inoue had thought through that e-book conundrum by the time Viz Media digitally released REAL (his other basketball series) in April 2021.

Meanwhile, the original English-subtitled Slam Dunk anime series has been kicking around on Crunchyroll since October 2008. In May 2015, a company by the name of Flatiron Films released a bare-bones DVD set featuring the first 14 episodes of Kaleidoscope Entertainment's English dub of the series. Not much is known about Flatiron Films outside of their ownership under Cinedigm, which morphed into Cineverse since then. Much like Toei's previous DVDs, Flatiron's Slam Dunk: Season 1 Vol 1 came and went without real fanfare.

For the next seven years, not much chatter surrounded the series. But that all changed when a deafening roar of enthusiasm came out of Japan in the wake of The First Slam Dunk's theatrical release on December 3rd, 2022. The film was a smash hit at the Japanese box office, earning 15.73 billion yen (roughly 106 million USD) throughout an extended nine-month run that ended on August 31st, 2023. Directed by Takehiko Inoue himself, The First Slam Dunk generally garnered high praise from critics and numerous accolades from film festivals around the world.

Capitalizing on that global excitement, GKIDS released the film in North American theaters on July 28th, 2023. Additionally, the company partnered with NYAV Post to produce an English dub for the film. Leading up to the film's release, Viz Media spun up a series of manga reprints, and Toei started uploading a brand-new HD transfer of the anime to their YouTube channel. Once the film was out, positive word of mouth continued to spread through American film and anime circles. Around this time, a handful of people started to notice the manga steadily working its way onto Right Stuf Anime's bestseller's list.

But despite the strong buzz around it, The First Slam Dunk unfortunately failed to meet sales expectations. According to Box Office Mojo, the film made just shy of 1.3 million dollars throughout a roughly two-month run.

In his examination of the film's run, Justin Sevakis said that it suffered from not just the sports problem, but a lack of name recognition with Western audiences. He also mentioned that Hollywood is fairly tired of sports fiction these days. Speaking before the release of Challengers, Sevakis said that 2011's Moneyball was the last big sports film he could think of. When the wild success and memeability of 2020's The Last Dance entered the conversation, Sevakis pointed out that it is a documentary series, not a fictional work.

Aside from a torrent of cute commercials promoting The First Slam Dunk's Japanese Blu-ray release earlier in 2024, word remained mum on the film. That was until April 1st, 2024, when GKIDS announced that they'd be bringing the film to North American home video on June 25th. Following the announcement, the film climbed Amazon's sales charts. Before release, The First Slam Dunk stood at a high of #5 in the Anime rankings, behind Berserk 1997 and The Boy and the Heron. Once orders started shipping, the film reached highs of #3 in Anime and #1 in Kids & Family. As of this writing, it currently stands at #55 in Movies & TV overall. It's still too early to tell if these strong sales will affect the manga, but I hope it does.

It's only a hunch, but I believe the Blu-ray's initial success comes down to one factor: that “low but persisting rumbling” I mentioned. It hasn't stopped since the film hit theaters a year ago and only kept rattling around in the minds of those who saw it. Additionally, many (myself included) couldn't find a screening in their neck of the woods. The lack of access to such a highly praised work created a real groundswell leading to the film's North American home video debut. And for all that anticipation, the film exceeded all of my expectations. The First Slam Dunk works so well as an introduction to the series and an amazing film in its own right. If it was my first encounter with Slam Dunk, I would've jumped into the manga right away. It's almost as if the film is telling its viewers “If you loved that, there's way more where that came from.” Hopefully, VIZ's recent reprints of the manga (alongside Vagabond and REAL) will have people thinking about reading the classic for themselves. Then maybe, just maybe, more people see what I meant when I said that Slam Dunk is one of the greatest stories ever inked; sports hurdle or not.