Baseball, in the Baseball Manga? Absurd!

Do you want somebody to say that?

After going a long time thinking I'd never find a copy of the 7th volume of Cross Game at a reasonable price (meaning, not $70 or more), I stumbled across someone selling a copy on Amazon for about $15 this January (as of last week's manga review, we moved on from stuff I bought last year.)

In a sharp, and welcome, departure from the all-consuming teen melodrama offering that was volume 6, volume 7 actually spends a lot of its pages on baseball. It's the beginning of the last tournament to reach Koshien this group of players will have, so it's now or never for Ko and Akaishi to make Wakaba's dream a reality.

Adachi doesn't only focus on the Seishu Gakuen squad, as their old foe Coach Daimon's team would face them in the second round. If he makes it that far, because in his path is a team led by Azuma's old teammate Miki, the one who left even before Daimon got fired because he wanted to play on a team where everyone loved playing baseball.

Adachi takes a different route with each game Seishu plays. The first one is such a dominant win the game is called after 5 innings (mercy rule), and is primarily used for a joke about how half the guys on the team asked Aoba if she'd go on a date with them if they reached certain achievements - one using two stolen bases as the benchmark for example - and none of them hitting the mark. Ko promised he'd get double-digit strikeouts if it meant they wouldn't go on a date, and pulled it off, though he apparently didn't realize it until Aoba mentioned it. But was Aoba disappointed? Oh no, the internal conflict!

The second game is a tense pitcher's duel against Miki's team. Miki's the ace pitcher now instead of the centerfielder, and while he's not on Ko's level of dominance, he gets results. Adachi wisely focuses on how Seishu keeps getting guys on base, but Miki always bears down and keeps them from scoring. Only late in the game does Aoba note that the opposing team hasn't gotten a single hit off Ko, leaning into the notion of how good a pitcher he is.

The third game is really just used to set-up a gag for the fourth game, as Ko tries to figure out why he was throwing harder than normal (in the process helping his team finish the game before a rain delay could begin.) When he asks Aoba for her perspective - because his motion is based on hers - if there was anything different with his mechanics, her observation leads to him walking a bunch of guys in the next game, though they still win easily.

The fifth game is likewise breezed through in a couple of pages, as the story shifts focus to Akane, who is in the hospital for another round of treatment for an unspecified condition. Aoba spends a lot of time with her, while Ko seems determined to just push through and keep playing, reasoning there's nothing he can do but hope things turn out well. And he knows how little good that does. The main issue is Akaishi, who's thrown by the whole thing and who struggles in the 5th game. This as the ace pitcher and elite slugger of Ryuou Gakuin, the presumptive favorites and team that knocked Seishu out of the tournament last time, remark that Seishu's catcher (Akaishi) is the one big advantage Seishu has over them.

So Akaishi's got to get his shit together, because standing between them and Ryuou is a team that seems blessed. Every win's been by a single run, and in close games, things can turn on one little thing. Adachi shows the Nishikura team score their first run in a series of isolated panels on one page. A grounder taking a funny hop over Senda's head. A bunt, and the runner advancing to second. Then a pop fly that lands just inside the foul line. Little things that added up to cancel out a lead-off home run from Senda. The panels contrast Nishikura's coach looking on confidently from behind his glasses, all the while Ko is mowing down batter after batter.

The volume ends on Ko visiting Akane, then he and Aoba visiting Wakaba's grave. It's a signpost of their shared history, that Ko agrees to tell Aoba about Akane's surgery (while hiding it from Akaishi) and how far they've come from when they were kids. There's a flashback showing the two of them getting in trouble for throwing mudballs at each other in the cemetery when they were little.

With all that out of the way, it's time for the big showdown, which we looked at when I reviewed volume 8.

Walk-Off Home Run

Is Senda right (for once)? We'll check back in later.

Volume 8 of Cross Game is the final volume of the series. After the romantic melodrama-swamped mess that was volume 6, this book is blessedly focused on the rematch between Seishu Gakuen (the school Ko pitches for), and Ryuou Gakuin, who defeated them the year before (seen in volume 5). At stake is the chance to reach the Koshien high school championship. Since this is their last year, it's the last chance for Ko and Akaishi to make Wakaba's dream of them playing in that championship come true.

But Ryuou Gakuin have their own ace pitcher and star slugger, superior to the ones that headlined the team last tie, so it's not going to be easy. Adachi cuts between the action on the field and Aoba and Junpei watching in the stands (also at stake: Aoba's big sister agreed to marry Junpei if the team makes Koshien). Ko promised Aoba he'd throw a 100 mph fastball, and so Adachi throws in a lot of close-up panels of the radar gun readings on the scoreboard.

This is the frustrating thing about this series for me. Adachi is really damn good at making the games tense. Lots of small panels that jump from one the ball taking a funny hop, to the reaction in the dugout, to a close-up of a foot touching home plate. Then sometimes Adachi will switch to an establishing shot, the bleachers for example, then back to a small panel of a ball bouncing off the steps. He may not draw the ball making contact with the bat, but you the see the leave the pitcher's hand, and you see where it ends up. 

Aoba's cousin, Mizuki, doesn't attend the game, but Adachi uses that to good effect, as Mizuki finds himself drawn into watching the game on TV, and when there's a big hit, he can hear to crowd's roar all the way from the house. (Mizuki also ends up stumbling across Aoba's journals, which help him make peace with the fact she likes Ko, and he goes on walkabout. Still feels like Adachi introduced Mizuki, then had little to do with him.)

Adachi also has some fun with the announce team, at times having one of them make a comment, then switch to the dugout in the next panel and have the manager point back at the previous panel to ask his players if the comment was correct, or vice versa. Late in the game, he switches out the announcer who pretends to be knowledgeable with one who responds to his partner's rhetorical questions as though they were literal. It help with the rise and fall of the tension.

Point being, the presentation of the game is expertly done, and I would have gladly taken a lot more of that. We also get to see Azuma let himself really enjoy playing baseball, even though he's sad on some level that he'll never get to face Ko - this version of Ko, a true ace pitcher - one-on-one.

Adachi also throws in a funny at-bat where the opposing pitcher, a little annoyed at all the oohing and aahing over Ko's velocity, decides to strike out Ko on three straight fastballs. He only hits 93 mph, but Ko's surprised at how fast that is. As Akaishi notes, it's because Ko never gets to see how fast his own pitches are from the batter's box.

Overall, it's very enjoyable conclusion to the book, even if I'm never clear on why these baseball manga are always about getting to the championship at Koshien, but never actually show any of the games played there. It's like having a baseball movie, but cutting off when the team earns the right to go to the World Series. Just odd.

Huh, look at that. Broken clock and all that.

Must be the Off-Season

Yeah, I imagine it's annoying, too. What idiot's idea was this?

Volume 6 of Cross Game was almost the breaking point for me. There is zero actual baseball in this volume, as Adachi focuses almost entirely on the love triangle stuff. I had to go look up the Wikipedia entry to see if there was actually going to be any more baseball in this thing over the remaining two volumes.

It's more like a love polygon at this point. You have Aoba and Ko, who continue to snipe and bicker, but know each other very well. But there's also Ko and Akane, the girl who looks like a teenage version of Aoba's deceased sister, Wakaba. But the catcher Akaishi had a crush on Wakaba, so he's awkward around Akane, while trying to push her and Ko together. It's really creepy, since he describes it as wanting to see Wakaba smile, and she was happiest around Ko, sooooo. . . Even when Ko and Akaishi discuss after the date that hey, Akane knows all sorts of people and places they don't because she's a unique being and not just Aged-Up Wakaba, it still feels as though she's treated as interchangeable with a girl that's been dead for 10 years.

There's also still Aoba's cousin who has a crush on her. Miyuka, or Miyuki, or whatever (Mizuki). It really doesn't matter, as he's been so largely shoved into the background I wonder why the hell Adachi even bothered to add him to the series. He doesn't bring anything to the table as a character. He doesn't care about baseball at all, but that's such an obvious deal-breaker with Aoba, and his interest in mountain climbing rarely comes up, so what's the point? If the scene needs an argumentative character or an idiot, use Nakanashi or Senda, respectively.

On top of all that mess, now the star slugger Azuma lets slip that if he was going to date any girl, it would be Aoba. *slams head against desk* The tiny bit of baseball is Aoba pitching batting practice to Azuma and getting injured when he hits a line drive. Of course, then Azuma can't hit because he's so sad about what he did and he visits her in the hospital a lot and yeesh. Adachi at least draws the parallel between this and what happened to Azuma's brother, which is what made Azuma such a humorless dick when the series began.

Adachi can want to write the teen romance stuff if they want, but that's not the part I'm invested in. The team trying to improve, trying to break through, Ko, Aoba, and Akaishi trying to make Wakaba's dream come true and reach Koshien, that's what I'm invested in, and it basically stalls out for 500 pages. There's some humor, although the parts I laugh at are mostly Coach Maeno's lines. The back-and-forth between Ko and Aoba doesn't really feel funny to me.

A Ghost from Their Past

Cut to still image of Hayao Miyazaki saying, 'anime was a mistake.'

Owing once again to the peculiarities in when and how I find volumes of Cross Game, we're getting to volume 5 before volume 4. The first half revolves around a showdown between Seishu Gakuen, led by Ko and Azuma, and the powerhouse Ryuou Gakuin, who are the #1 seed in this qualifying tournament to reach Koshien, which I guess is a big national high school baseball tournament that takes place in Koshien Stadium. I just know every baseball manga or anime I've seen (all three of them) is fixated on getting to Koshien.

Seishu already won two games to get this far, but Ryuou's a whole other matter. They have their own ace and slugging first baseman, although as the game goes on it appears their back-ups, both second years like Ko and Azuma, are even better. The game ends up turning on an event that really doesn't make much sense to me. Ko catches a scorching line drive with his glove, which somehow makes his hand so numb he can't properly lift his arm? This is something that gets hinted during the game and even after. Basically, the game-winning hit gets past him because he doesn't get his glove up high enough to grab it, and Mitsuru keeps making it seem like it's due to some inability to lift his arm, rather than not being able to feel his hand.

Seems like horseshit to me, but I guess it's to make us wait until the very end of the series to see if they actually make it to Koshien. 

In the meantime, there's teen romance angst plotlines to focus on, and oh geez, does this stuff get silly. In volume 4, Mitsuru introduced Aoba's cousin Mizuki as a potential rival for her affections (which Ko would insist he doesn't have anyway.) This also involved multiple characters assuring us that yes, first cousins can get married and, look, I know different people have different opinions on things like this. I am on the Internet, I have seen the sorts of fanfiction people write. 

Hell, I knew a guy in high school that thought I was weird for being disturbed that in the movie The Devil's Advocate (with Keanu and Al Pacino), Keanu is encouraged to father a child with a woman with the same father as him (meaning, Al Pacino). Of course, Gregor was kind of an asshole on a good day, so I wouldn't use him as a baseline for what's OK in any circumstance. Point is, Adachi can have as many characters say it's cool as they want, I'm still going to look sideways at it.

It doesn't matter too much in this story, because almost immediately we're shown Aoba barely notices Mizuki, despite his attempts to hang out or let her copy his English homework. Meanwhile, the similarities between she and Ko in everything (cleanliness, approach to fashion, sleeping habits, reactions to movies) are hammered at. So in this volume, we get a new complication: a new neighbor for Ko. A new neighbor who happens to look just like Aoba's deceased sister Wakaba would, if she hadn't died and continued to grow up.

So we get lots of people seeing her without realizing this is Akane, daughter of the owner of the new soba restaurant, and freaking out about Wakaba's ghost being out and walking around. I mostly feel bad for Akane, who has no idea any of this is going on until Senda comes barging into the restaurant and very bluntly says he's there to see the girl who looks like Aoba's dead sister.

Akaishi probably should have hit him harder, honestly.

Sigh. This is a frustrating development. I'm interested in the baseball stuff. Ko trying to see how good he can be, Akaishi wanting to make Wakaba's dream a reality, figuring out how Aoba's going to get to play in an official game. Hell, even Azuma gradually starting to enjoy baseball again, rather than doing it to make up for ending his brother's promising career. Secondary to that is at least some of the humor. At least Azuma's brother is being slightly less of a pervert now that he's actually dating Aoba's oldest sister, Ichiyo. This relationship drama stuff? No thanks, especially when we're getting into daytime soap opera-esque "she's a twin for my dead sister" hijinks.

Prequel to a Rematch

Inspirational leadership right there. The guy is a high school pitcher with four breaking balls, and you're busting his chops about his fastball? There are major league pitchers who barely have one! This fucking guy, I tell you.

Volume 3 of Cross Game was focused on the rematch between the Seishu Gakuen varsity team and the "portables" squad, led by Ko and Akaishi. Unsurprisingly then, volume 2 is mostly about the first game between the two teams. It ends in a loss, which sets up the portables' intense training in preparation for the rematch.

Adachi sets a few things in motion here. This is Ko's first time pitching in a real game, so it gives him a sense of what he's up against if he's going to bring Wakaba's dream to fruition. At the same time, Yuhei's perceptions of Ko change over the course of the game. Ko challenges Yuhei each time he comes to bat, rather than pitch around him, and gets burned the first three times. But as he tells Yuhei, each time he really didn't think Yuhei would be able to hit a home run off him.

Adachi's also working hard to show that, even if Yuhei's social skills are non-existent, he takes this seriously. He's one of the only members of his team who recognizes the portables have been scouting their weaknesses, or who understands that varsity is winning because Ko keeps challenging Yuhei, rather than just walking him and attacking the rest of the lineup. Coach Daimon continues to be an overconfident, smirking jerk, who insists the game wouldn't be close if he was actually doing any coaching. Which makes it sound like he's not doing his job, but his argument is this will help them realize how much they need to listen to him.

Yeah, but if you lose to the "small fry", then you just look like a jackass.

Beyond that, Adachi has Aoba watching in the stands with an old man who becomes plot-relevant in volume 3. It shows not only her knowledge of the varsity team, from the time Daimon made her pitch batting practice until she collapsed, but her (maybe unconscious) confidence in Ko. Which is strange, given her statement later on that she doesn't trust him at all, but she has a grasp on what he's thinking throughout the game. When he settles down after allowing some runs, she correctly notes he probably blew up in the dugout.

This is also when Adachi adds Senda, the comic relief character, to the cast, as he gets demoted from the varsity to the portables in the middle of the game. Daimon had him pitch so the defense could show off, but when he gave up some runs, he got the boot. So Coach Meneo, who seems where Senda's gifts actually lie, turns him into a shortstop.

And Adachi even manages a little character arc for some of the seniors on the portables. They spend most of the game hot-dogging and playing selfishly in the belief they can wow Coach Daimon and get back on the varsity squad. Over the course of the game, at least a couple of them change their perspective on this being their last chance, and try to make sacrifices to help the team win. Fortunate, or Robert DeNiro probably would have shown up to smash their heads in with a bat.

Adachi continues to do a good job of figuring out how to depict the action on the field. Showing the baseball as a indistinct white blur. Using a full-page splash of Yuhei finishing his swing, then following that with a smaller panel of the ball going over the fence, shown from a long distance (probably Ko's perspective on the mound.) When there's lots of action happening simultaneously, a ball in play and runners moving, Adachi will switch to a bunch of small triangular panels all at the same level on the page. Then he'll move back to larger panels as the different parts of the play converge, say when a runner gets thrown out at the plate.

Rematch Time

That's the spirit! I think. . .maybe.

As far as these tpb/manga reviews go, I hit them in the order I bought them, which is why we're skipping volume 2 of Cross Game and going to volume 3. The first half is largely focused on a rematch between Seishu Gakuen's front-line team, and the "portables", led by Ko and Akaishi, with their respective coaches' jobs on the line.

Adachi advances a few different threads here. One is the continued progress of Ko as a pitcher, as he utterly dominates Coach Daimon's lineup. Adachi uses a couple of different characters as the POV here. 

One is Aoba Tsukishima, who is added to the portable team as their starting centerfielder (even though she can't play in any official games because she's a girl.) Aoba still doesn't believe in Ko, but she also hasn't seen him pitch in a game other than the first one between these two teams. We see that in how immediately irritated she gets with him. When he walks one batter in the late innings, Adachi draws her glaring and muttering "Hey!" in the next panel. This is a chance for Ko to prove to his biggest doubter that he's actually taking this seriously and not just a goof-off.

The other is Yuhei Azuma, the star slugger, who Adachi begins to soften, or maybe flesh out is a better descriptor. We get to meet his older brother Junpei (who's a pervert, but otherwise an upbeat guy and supportive brother). Yuhei's recognized something in Ko already, demonstrated in volume 1 by the fact Yuhei bothers to remember his name, a courtesy he didn't extend to most of his teammates. He's the only one who doesn't dismiss the portables chances of winning the game. Though that may have as much to do with how aware he's become of Coach Daimon's limitations. The portables probably win because Yuhei lightly injures himself so he can't play, telling Daimon to prove this team is good enough to win without him.

He's still kind of a prick, or just has a very deadpan delivery on his jokes, but Adachi is working hard to show that Yuhei isn't simply condescending to the others. Rather, he holds them to the same standard holds himself. Because he believes it's the only way he'll achieve his goals.

Adachi really likes using the head-on perspective during the game action. The baseball coming directly towards us, slightly squashed looking. Or using seeing the catcher from the perspective or whoever is throwing, with the ball already in their mitt. Or showing Ko at the end of his delivery. It's probably the best approach, breaking up the action into small panels. A baseball field is so large, it would be hard to show all the action in one panel and convey any sense of action or tension. Better to save that for establishing shots, and zoom in on specific moments.

After that game, Adachi jumps ahead a little as a way to shake things up again. Yuhei's brother is trying to court Aoba's oldest sister, and Yuhei is no living at Ko's house, because all the players Daimon recruited left with him, so there's no one in the dorms. Which makes Yuhei sort of the outsider perspective on everything with Ko and Aoba. We see that there are tons of boys smitten with Aoba, none of whom she's interested in, and Akaishi is actively keeping all the girls away from Ko by saying he's Aoba's property. Aoba is unaware of this, which is probably good for Akaishi's health. Or maybe Ko's since she'd probably blame him somehow.

Aoba and Ko are still pretty antagonistic to each other, so I'm not really buying there's going to be some big romance between them eventually, but I know that's where it's going nonetheless, even with the late introduction of Aoba's cousin, Mizuki.

A Hidden Ace

Of all the various manga series I've tried for the first time this year, Cross Game stands as my favorite of the bunch. It's also the first sports manga I've ever tried. It's not a new series, the first volume was released here in the U.S. in 2005, but other than vaguely remembering some reviews on the old Comics Should Be Good CBR blog, it was new to me.

Volume 1 is massive, over 570 pages starting when the main character Ko and his friend Wakaba are in fifth grade. Ko comes off as either lazy, or just at that stage where different things grab his interest suddenly and for a short period of time, baseball not being one of them. He convinces his friends to form a team so they'll buy their equipment and uniforms from his parents' store. Wakaba's the second of four daughters, born the same day as Ko, generally sweet and friendly, well-liked by most everyone. That includes the toughest kid in their grade, Akaishi, who's looming presence spooks Ko into actually playing a his first game of baseball just for safety in numbers.

Then, having introduced several of the key players, Adachi kills Wakaba 150 pages in and shortly after, jumps the book ahead four years. Look, it's a 15+ year old series, and most of it revolves around that event, so I'm not worrying spoilers here.

The time jump allows Adachi to change things up from what we'd briefly been introduced to. Aoba, Wakaba's younger sister, baseball lover and Ko's harshest critic, plays on the junior high team as a pitcher, but Ko himself still seems to have no interest in baseball. His friend Nakanishi, who loved baseball, isn't on the school team, but Akaishi is, having abandoned fighting entirely. Over the next ~400 pages, things are gradually teased out. What changed for Akaishi. What Ko's really been up to. The goal that's going to, as far as I can tell having read volumes 1 through 3 and 5, drive the story forward from then on.

It's also a chance to introduce a pair of antagonists. One is the new high school coach, Daimon. Think all those college basketball coaches that win everywhere they go, but leave under a cloud of rules violations. John Calipari mixed with Jon Voight's asshole football coach from Varisty Blues. It's actually impressive how well Adachi conveys what an arrogant, cruel jackass Daimon is. Completely emotionless when he's telling a player they're off the team if they can practice because their arm is sore. Telling players they're nothing but fertilizer for the varsity team. At most, there's a smug smirk on his face. Having read the later volumes, it's intensely gratifying to see him get his comeuppance.

The other antagonist is Azuma Yuhei, who is the stereotypical extremely gifted, arrogant jock dickhead. He's not a loud braggart, but just constantly condescending and rude. He treats his own teammates like servants and admits he doesn't bother to learn names of people he thinks don't matter. When Daimon asks how many of his teammates' names he's learned, he says five.

The problem for me, having seen those later volumes, is Adachi's going to try and give Yuhei a past tragedy of his own to explain his personality and drive, but still be a dickhead. Maybe it's meant to be a very dry sense of humor, but he's so stone-faced most of the time it doesn't feel like it. As of volume 5 I still can't stand the character and want to see him fall on his face. I mean, Ko, Aoba, and Akaishi are all affected and driven by a loss far harsher than Yuhei's, and they don't act like assholes. Well, Aoba does towards Ko, but there's all sorts of other stuff tied up in that.

The writing and the art work for the scenes that are sad and solemn. In the aftermath of Wakaba's death, Adachi uses largely silent panels that focus on the characters' faces and their isolation. The way each of Aoba, Ko, and Akaishi try to deal with the loss and their grief. Most of the funeral service is shown as Ko trying to peer past all the adults in mourning clothes to see Wakaba's shrine, but there's only a single panel of it. It's a clear panel that dominates the page, but it's like that was all the glimpse he could get.

There's more humor than sadness, although Adachi highlights how memories of people you lost will crop up at surprising times. Ko and another character named Senda (a loudmouth braggart that repeatedly gets shown up, so I don't mind him the way I do Yuhei) receive the brunt of the humor, but Adachi pokes at himself occasionally. Characters do plugs for his past series, or when he wastes pages making jokes about his editors having no idea how difficult 18 pages can be to complete someone in story will complain about. I could do without the upskirt shots, even if I could be charitable and allow some of them are meant to be from Ko's perspective and it might speak to where his mind is at in 9th grade. But that argument definitely wouldn't work for all of them

Adachi's approach to drawing the actual baseball is to break it up into small, individual actions (see the page at the top of this post). A panel of the ball, then one of bat and ball. Or a panel of the ball bouncing into the outfield, then one of someone rounding a base. The game is one of a lot of small, individual actions happening on the same field, so it works pretty well. If it was basketball or American football, where so much of each play is reliant on how all the players move in concert or in reaction to each other, I'm not sure it would. But the having the panels tilt lets them lead the eye naturally to the next one, and he's able to do so in a way that feels like it matches the characters' movements. Like the tilt down and to the right is part of Ko's windup as he prepares to throw the ball.