03-22-2023, 12:07 AM
Meant to make this ages ago. Post about manga in here so that we have a nice stockpile of recommendations and reviews for anybody who wants to pass some time. I'll go first.
First recommendation is Shinobu Kaitani's ONE OUTS. I've written before about how I generally find fiction written around games to be boring and neurotic. This is an exception. It's not just an exception. It's a masterpiece. Baseball is a fairly simple game, with its methodical and tactical side balanced out by physicality and action. Point I mean to make by that is that baseball is sufficiently real, and this manga sufficiently real in its approach, that the story being grounded in a game does not create room to break with human experience. This is not a manga about a game because its author and audience can't handle raw humanity. This is a manga about a game as experienced by raw humanity.
This is a story with edge and moral vision. It's incredibly entertaining as a story by a Japanese nerd on how a sufficiently skilled and devious person could break baseball in half and dominate it, but that's not all, or even the heart of the story. This is about how a sufficiently skilled and devious person could break people and dominate them. ONE OUTS is about the overman playing baseball.
This manga is absolutely awesome and I had a great time reading it. I very strongly recommend it.
And you can take this OP as a general template if you want, or just share titles, pages, panels, blog about what you're reading, whatever. I just want lots of references to manga in one place so in the future I can browse.
First recommendation is Shinobu Kaitani's ONE OUTS. I've written before about how I generally find fiction written around games to be boring and neurotic. This is an exception. It's not just an exception. It's a masterpiece. Baseball is a fairly simple game, with its methodical and tactical side balanced out by physicality and action. Point I mean to make by that is that baseball is sufficiently real, and this manga sufficiently real in its approach, that the story being grounded in a game does not create room to break with human experience. This is not a manga about a game because its author and audience can't handle raw humanity. This is a manga about a game as experienced by raw humanity.
This is a story with edge and moral vision. It's incredibly entertaining as a story by a Japanese nerd on how a sufficiently skilled and devious person could break baseball in half and dominate it, but that's not all, or even the heart of the story. This is about how a sufficiently skilled and devious person could break people and dominate them. ONE OUTS is about the overman playing baseball.
This manga is absolutely awesome and I had a great time reading it. I very strongly recommend it.
And you can take this OP as a general template if you want, or just share titles, pages, panels, blog about what you're reading, whatever. I just want lots of references to manga in one place so in the future I can browse.