To be fair, it's likely a little bit of both... but in for a penny, in for a pound, am I right? Anyway, let's see what 12 posts/subjects I've written (about) over both 2023 & 2024 have given me the warmest feelings when I think back on them!
An "Overdosed" History of Manga?! Translating & Examining the Yarisugi Manga Timeline (January 9, 2023)
For all its faults as a company, & there's plenty to say there... there's a ton of weird things you can find for sale over on Amazon, especially the Amazon Marketplace. In late 2022 I was looking up something (I honestly can't recall what, as I am wont to look up random things) & one of the results was a listing over on Amazon. While looking over the listing I happened to notice something in the related results section of that page, specifically a Japanese book about manga. If you look carefully you can find all manner of Japanese-language books on the North American Amazon webstore, some with listings in English but various others listed in Japanese. In this instance it was a book from 2015 titled Yarisugi Manga Retsuden: Legend of Overdosed Comics by Nobunaga Minami, and it was being sold by a Marketplace seller based out of Japan for only $20.29 (with free shipping!). After looking it up & seeing that it was a book covering a variety of wild & crazy manga that "overdid" things in some way, including titles like Ring ni Kakero & Team Astro, I decided to order it through Amazon, since it was a very reasonable price. It eventually arrived, and while I obviously couldn't properly read the book itself, as my knowledge of written Japanese isn't good enough for long-form prose, I did come across something interesting when I saw a massive two-page chart across Pages 16 & 17.
In this chart was a cavalcade of manga, 193 different titles in total, organized in chronological order from the 60s to the late 00s & categorized across five genres: Sports, School, Action & Sci-Fi, Love & Sex, Social Awareness, & Career. I shared a scan of this timeline on Twitter, wishing that it was in English, upon which the legendary Helen McCarthy herself "asked" if I could do it myself... and, well, when one of the most respected English-speaking writers of anime/manga history makes a request you don't say "No". So, naturally, I decided that since I was already going to translate this Yarisugi Manga timeline into English then I might as well turn it into a written piece where I go over each & every one of the 193 different manga listed, though naturally with that many titles most of them wound up being nothing more than a basic acknowledgement of their existence, especially for the most well known entries. Still, doing this introduced me to so many titles, many of which I had never known of before, and I came out of this whole endeavor with a little more knowledge of manga history. For example, Kazuya Fukumoto's 60s baseball duology of Chikai no Makyu & Kuroi Himitsu Heiki were the origins of the "makyu" in manga, especially the latter, which in turn helped introduce the idea of named special moves to sports manga, which would eventually evolve into the wild & crazy attacks seen in general action manga to this very day via a connected timeline of titles like Star of the Giants, Ashita no Joe, Team Astro, Ring ni Kakero, Kinnikuman, & Captain Tsubasa, before finally titles like Fuma no Kojirou & especially Fist of the North Star removed all pretense of sports completely.
In the end, the entire point of this piece was to showcase a really cool example of something released in Japan covering aspects of manga that we'd never otherwise see released in English (because, to be frank, most English-speaking manga fans/readers don't care about the history of the medium... or, at least, only care if they can tie it into their own favorite works), and while the Yarisugi Manga timeline is but a small example of that, its sheer scale of titles listed makes it immensely cool to just look at, and now these two pages are at least viewable in English.
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| Again, it's only fitting to use the literal final pages of the manga. |
Otoko Zaka (The Shonen Jump+ Run) (July 29, 2024)
2024 marked the 50th Anniversary year for Masami Kurumada, my all-time favorite mangaka, so I wanted to celebrate Kurumada's Golden Anniversary by dedicating the entire year to the man, with at least one written piece about him or his works each month. Naturally, that means that this entire list could (in theory) be nothing but those "posts", but I wanted to be fair (plus there's all of 2023 to consider) so I limited the Kurumada entries to just four, two in this half & two in the other half. So for the first Kurumada-related pick I decided to go with the manga that took the man nearly four entire decades to finally reach the finish of, Otoko Zaka. Debuting back in mid-1984, Kurumada's fourth serialized manga was intended to be his magnum opus, the one that he would finally allow him to consider himself a true "mangaka"... and it got cancelled in early 1985. He infamously declared Otoko Zaka as "incomplete" on the final page of that Weekly Shonen Jump run, and he'd leave it as that until 2014 when he revived the series in the digital "pages" of Weekly PlayNews, continuing where he had left off at nearly 30 years prior.
Then, in 2017, it was decided that Otoko Zaka's revival would move over to Shonen Jump+, which launched a couple of months after Kurumada had revived his infamous manga, and six years later Kurumada would finally be able to declare Otoko Zaka as being "complete" at the very end of 2023. I had previously reviewed "The Original Run" in 2015 to celebrate the revival of the manga, & then in 2018 I reviewed "The Weekly PlayNews Run" to celebrate its move to Shonen Jump+, so it only made sense that in 2024 I would review "The Shonen Jump+ Run" & like Kurumada himself bring an end to something I had started a good while ago. I have always prided myself on being a "Masami Kurumada fan", because while you constantly see "Saint Seiya fans" do nothing but stick to any news regarding that one series & its numerous spin-offs, to the point where some will literally bemoan Kurumada for doing anything that isn't Seiya-related, I have instead been able to see the actual evolution of the man himself through his works, and while it's not exactly in purely chronological order I've still seen how his works have changed. Otoko Zaka is easily the greatest encapsulation of that evolution, as while the original run in the mid-80s was 1,000% true to Kurumada's style at that time the revival focused on showing Jingi Kikukawa himself as learning that the fight-focused & rough manner in which he lived his life wasn't as sacred as he initially thought it was, and in fact was more self-destructive than anything, learning instead to aim for peace through unifying people together, with fighting only being something that should be done when no other option exists. The SJ+ run, which comprises the final five volumes, best exemplifies that change in belief which, I'm sure, Kurumada himself had gone through in the literal decades between when he first debuted Otoko Zaka & when he revived it, and the end result is easily the strongest run of chapters for this series.
It's no coincidence that my review of the WSJ run made it to my "Favorite Posts of 2015" list, & the same happened with my review of the WPN run in my "Favorite Posts of 2018" list. Otoko Zaka is, without a doubt, one of Masami Kurumada's greatest manga of all time, right up there with Ring ni Kakero, Saint Seiya, & B't X, and I wish this was a manga that more people outside of Japan could readily check out, because it truly shows how damn good of a storyteller Masami Kurumada can be. Unfortunately, outside of J-Pop giving it a release in Italy (which itself looks to finish up on literally the last day of 2024), that will sadly remain an impossibility.
It's All About the Ataris, Baby... The Companies, Not the Punk Rock Band (September 4, 2023)
Despite being born in 1986 my earliest memories of playing video games was via the Atari 2600, so there is a strong bit of nostalgia for me with that brand... a brand that can very easily cause confusion to anyone who tries to talk about games from "Atari" due to a simple question: "Which 'Atari' are you even talking about?!" To this day you can easily find people online referencing a singular "Atari" when referring to games released under that brand, and even people who go over video game history aren't immune to confusing one "Atari" with another. Therefore, in late 2023 I decided to go over each & every "Atari" I could find in video game history & organize them in chronological order, and I even included a couple that weren't necessarily directly involved with video games, but I felt that it was best to be thorough. There was the original Atari, Inc. that existed from 1970 to 1984 that effectively launched the video game industry as we truly know it (the Magnavox Odyssey came first, yes, but it was Atari's products that truly launched the industry itself), which itself was then split up into two completely different companies, due to the Crash of 1983. There was Atari Corporation, which effectively carried on the legacy of Atari, Inc. by way of maintaining the rights to everything that came before... & slowly killed itself over time before getting absorbed into JT Storage in 1996. Then there was Atari Games, which continued the Atari legacy over in the arcade scene (& even challenged Nintendo's draconian policies on the home market via Tengen), before the usage of the "Atari" branding itself died by the end of 1999, while the company itself would stick around as a developer until 2003; today, Atari Games' catalog belongs to Warner Bros.
The death of Atari Corporation eventually resulted in Hasbro picking up the remains & forming Atari Interactive, using the "Atari" brand for publishing purposes between 1998 & 2000, before selling the brand & all of its associated IPs (alongside the entirety of Hasbro Interactive itself) to Infogrames. Meanwhile, over in Japan Natsume Co. (not to be confused with former American division-turned-independent company Natsume, Inc.) formed a pachinko company offshoot in 2002 named... Atari, and due to how the term "Kabushiki gaisha" can be translated that means its full English name could have been "Atari, Inc.". A year after "the Japanese Atari" was formed, then, Infogrames would rename its Infogrames, Inc. division to... Atari, Inc.; yes, you may now proceed to slap your head in annoyance, at this point. Then, a year after that in 2004, a Japanese company that works in AR, VR, & MR was formed calling itself Atali, Inc. (ah, the wonders of Japan's usage of "R" & "L"), though when written in proper Japanese its name is the exact same thing as "the Japanese Atari" that Natsume formed... and this potential confusion lasted for roughly nine years! In 2009 Infogrames decided to simply retire its current name & just use the "Atari" branding for everything, resulting in the creation of Atari SA, which to this day remains the "main" Atari that exists & is now under the leadership of Wade Rosen, who has done a lot to give the "Atari" branding about as good of a revitalization as possible, after years upon years of it being sullied by terrible business decisions made under prior leadership. Finally, there's "Dream Creator" Natsume Atari, which was formed in late 2013 when Natsume Co. merged with "the Japanese Atari", seemingly just for sake of simplifying things.
At this point, Atari SA (which is technically licensing its own name from the current Atari, Inc.) should one day hire Natsume Atari to develop a game for them, and maybe it could even involve tech and/or research from Atali, which would then allow all of the currently existing "Ataris" to be credited in a single production!
The Career of Masashi Ikeda, Anime's Most Successfully Incomplete Director (for TV, At Least) (May 22, 2023)
On rare occasion I feel inspired to do an overview of a single person in the anime industry, usually a director of some sort. Previously I've done a four-part series for Yasuhiro Imagawa in 2014, a three-part series for Toshifumi Kawase in 2017, an in memoriam piece for the late Yu Yamamoto in 2018, one for Noriyuki Abe in 2022, & you can even (sort of) count one for Akira Tsuburaya in 2018. For this list I technically had two to consider for inclusion, but since one of those was how I started my year-long celebration of Masami Kurumada's 50th Anniversary I felt I should go with the other one to pick from, which was my 2023 overview of director Masashi Ikeda. This was, by far, the most curious person I've ever done a career overview for, because while all the others focused either on literally everything that person worked on (if it wasn't a colossally gigantic resume, or catalogue raisonné, if you prefer) or was focused more on a specific aspect of their career (like Kawase's 14-year streak of directing, or Abe's stretch of iconic shonen manga adaptations), they at least all generally had the feeling of "celebration" or "reverence" for the person (or, in the case of Akira Tsuburaya, playful parody). When it came to Masashi Ikeda, though... yeah, this overview had to have a bit of a different tone to it.
Why? Because Masashi Ikeda's career as an iconic & successful director almost doesn't make sense, when you really think about it.
The reason for that is because he's arguably best known for his seeming inability to ever direct an entire TV anime production from start to finish. Now, to be fair, Ikeda has indeed seen to completion the technical majority of the anime he's directed, but that's only if you include OVAs & TV specials. Literally every TV anime Ikeda has ever directed (Samurai Troopers, Gundam Wing, InuYasha, & Cluster Edge) have all seen him leave the production at some point, with the first two being due to creative disagreements (either with the sponsor or with his own creative staff), while for InuYasha it could admittedly just be a case of him only directing what he had initially signed on for, though there were rumor of disagreements with Rumiko Takahashi herself. Cluster Edge, though, is the most bizarre departure of all... since the entire project was Ikeda's creation to start with! Hell, Ikeda even walked away from directing the Street Fighter II Movie after a dispute with Capcom, which resulted in that project needing to scramble & get made in just six months!! Still, with a career this consistently incomplete (yet Sunrise kept bringing him back to direct, for whatever reason...) there was no way I could go over this without injecting a bit of sarcastic humor to it all, whether it was keeping a literal running tally of how many anime Ikeda actually saw to completion as director as I went over his career (the final result was 8 or 9/13, a.k.a. 61.5% or 69.2%, depending on how you define InuYasha), or using an image from an edited video made from a Maximilian Dood livestream to jokingly showcase how Ikeda seemingly getting kicked off of the production of his own original creation finally broke me, psychologically.
Make no mistake, I have a lot of respect for Masashi Ikeda. The anime that he did direct are (for the most part) often considered classics in their own right, and there's no denying that part of the reason why Sunrise kept bringing him back is because he's a talented director. However, there's also no denying that there's a very good reason why Ikeda has literally never directed another anime since a TV special in 2008, despite continuing to work in the anime industry to this very day. In fact, since this career overview Ikeda drew some storyboards for this 2024's Wistoria: Wand and Sword!
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| Kind of tough to pick an image to represent this series of pieces. In that case, might as well just default to Akira Toriyama. |
Ring ni Kakero, in Masami Kurumada & Others' Words: The Author's Notes & Afterwords (feat. shmuplations) (January 8, June 17, & December 16, 2024)
I try not to include stuff from the very same month as a list like this gets published, if only because I feel that it could be cheating to include something so "recent", but sometimes there will be exceptions & this is one of those times; also, said December pick is part of a larger series, so fair enough. Since I wanted to have at least one piece each month of 2024 to be dedicated to Masami Kurumada I quickly realized that I needed to cover as many of his works as possible in some form, even if I had already reviewed them previously... and maybe even had previously exhausted every possible avenue for them. That last part was especially true for Ring ni Kakero, Kurumada's first big hit & my personal favorite work of his, but I did have one last avenue to go down for RnK. In 2021 I had bought all 25 tankouban/tankoubon of RnK, mainly for the purposes of comparing it to the RnK1 "Deluxe Edition" re-release in 2001/2002, to see what exactly got changed or excised in the latter version, which today is essentially the "canon" version of RnK. However, included in each & every tankouban of RnK was a guest afterword written by either a professional boxer or (more interestingly) another mangaka (plus one volume that featured an actor)... and there was my way of including Ring ni Kakero for this year-long celebration!
Obviously, though, I'm not a translator & this was an amount well beyond my skills, so I needed to hire a professional to translate these afterwords, as well as the author's notes because why not; also, yes, I was fully ready to spend good money for this... which I did. At first I had thought of splitting these up across multiple translators, specifically those who had translated Kurumada-related anime & manga officially, but in the end only one of them actually got back to me, and they understandably weren't interested due to this obviously not being done in an official manner; still, they wished me luck, which was nice of them. That's when I decided to be a bit brazen & try it all with a single translator, one who was experienced in this kind of casual conversation style: shmuplations. While this was obviously not quite the same thing as the video game magazine interviews that they were celebrated for translating I still contacted them with the idea... and they were interested! Understandably, though, the translator who runs shmuplations (whose name can be found online but did specifically ask me to not use, so I will honor that request) is a very busy person, working not just on translations for their own site but also does get hired for professional translation gigs, so while the first of the planned three RnK author's notes & afterwords pieces managed to come out in January like I had planned the other two wouldn't come out until June & December, respectively; also, shmuplations had a child this year, so I wasn't going to rush them. Regardless, every time I got a new batch of translations I was always so excited to see what someone was going to say next, as while the afterwords from the boxers were neat it was the ones from the other mangaka (& even the actor) that truly were the main attraction of this trilogy, of sorts.
Like I said at the end of Part 3, guests afterwords like this are just not seen all that often in manga, and whenever it does happen it's almost always for a re-release, like Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin's aizouban release (which is what Vertical used for its English release) or Team Astro's ridiculous 5-volume omnibus release by Ohta Publishing. Ring ni Kakero, though, got this kind of special treatment for its very first collected release, and I am so glad that I was able to make all of it available in English. While I won't say that I'm now well & truly "done" with Ring ni Kakero on this blog, as I've always proven myself wrong with that, I have exhausted essentially every single avenue I can currently think of.
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| I made this image & have updated it. It is still dumb & stupid & I love it. |
If there's anything remotely close to what I'd consider a "successful" endeavor via The Land of Obscusion, it'd probably be The Ages of Jump, a giant series where I went over as many notable manga that ran in Weekly Shonen Jump in chronological order, in an attempt at giving some sense of a proper timeline of the iconic manga magazine. I originally did it in 2016 across seven parts that separated Jump's timeline into four distinct periods: The Bronze Age (1968-1983), The Golden Age (1983-1996), The Dark/Heroic Age (1996-1999), & The Silver Age (1999-2015). This original run hit a small zeitgeist within manga fandom, just enough so that if you literally search "The Ages of Jump" on Google you're actually given a featured snippet that lists the ages I just mentioned above; this is something automatically made by Google's systems, so I had no control over that. Then in 2018, to celebrate Jump's 50th Anniversary, I decided to do it again with The Ages of Jump Redux, a two-part addendum where I covered titles that I really should have included the first time, plus some notable or notorious additions that have their place in Jump history, as well as including some more recent titles from what I decided to call The Iron Age (2015-Present), i.e. the era Jump is currently in.
After doing the Redux I considered myself done with The Ages of Jump, but then new information sources came out, most importantly Jajanken: Shonen Jump Lab, which literally catalogs every single issue of Weekly Jump in history, right down to how long each manga ran & what order they were placed in the Table of Contents of each issue. With this new wealth of information now available, and Jump's 55th Anniversary happening in July of 2023, I decided to have some fun. First, I made my own Excel spreadsheet that listed every single Jump manga that Jajanken had on record & how many chapters each of them ran. With that information all on hand, then, I decided to write an overview about Jump's history of "early cancellation", because it's often stated by people online that Jump is more ruthless with its cancellations now than it ever had been. This resulted in what I called "The Tangerine Terminator", after the pun of the Japanese word for "tangerine", mikan, also technically being the word for "incomplete". The end result of all this was honestly a rather simple one: Weekly Shonen Jump has been rather consistent in how many new series get cancelled early ever since the 80s, and it's simply that simulpublishing now allows fans around the world to experience all of this in real time. Still, it was honestly a lot of fun to collect this info & write up The Tangerine Terminator, and like The Ages of Jump originally did it managed to catch some attention from the larger Jump fanbase online once it started getting shared on Reddit. The info wasn't exactly ground breaking, but people generally liked seeing the hard numbers I provided, though some complained about the length of the piece itself; that said, I always feel that context is important.
Meanwhile, now that I had said hard numbers when it came to chapter counts & even ToC placement, I decided to revive The Ages of Jump one last time, even if no one really was asking for a third run; this was solely for my own sense of "completion". This resulted in The Ages of Jump Encore, another two-part addendum which covered mostly deep cuts from the Bronze Age & Silver Age, alongside some final latter half Golden Age inclusions, with the goal mainly being to make sure anything that ran for at least 100 chapters in Weekly Jump was included in what was now an 11-part series, as well as any final gaps & infamous titles I could come across. This resulted in titles like Kujira Daigo, Obora Ichidai, Blue City, Ricky Typhoon, Kick Off, MonMonMon, Ou-sama was Roba, Takeki Ryusei, Butsu Zone, both Steel Ball Run and Beshari-Gurashi, the Takaya duology, Jumbor Barutronica, Enigma, Jaco the Galactic Patrolman, & iShojo (among others) getting added to the annals of The Ages of Jump, bringing the final tally to 178 manga... and even that doesn't reach 1/4 of the total amount of series that have appeared in the pages of the magazine. I will say that, despite literally ending Part 2 of Encore with a giant "Fin", there's always the possibility that I could eventually return again for a two-part "The Iron Age of Jump" & give this currently-happening era of Shonen Jump its proper due... but we're only now on the cusp of that era going past 10 years, and the prior three major eras all ran somewhere from 13 to 15 years, so luckily I won't have to even consider such a thing for a good while, regardless.
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This brings an end to Part 1 of this look at my personal favorite pieces of the past two years. As is standard, come back on New Year's Eve's Eve (i.e. December 30) for Part 2, as I go over the remaining picks from 2023 & 2024, and finally bring an end to this year.
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