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| The Houston Astros posted their first winning record in 1972. Coincidence? Yeah, definitely. |
Over time the term "makyu" would slowly go out of fashion, especially when other such "breaking balls" would be invented, and by the 1950s the term "henkakyu/changing ball" would instead be used for such pitches. However, right around that same time manga truly started to blow up & change from the rental-only market it initially was known as to more readily available serializations by way of proper manga magazines. Alongside that was a shift in focus in baseball manga from starring a batter to instead focusing on the pitcher, and this shift allowed the idea of the makyu to truly flourish. Throughout the 60s & 70s there were numerous baseball manga that would see their main characters throw wild & fantastical pitches, usually (but not always) with some sort of logic behind their execution but often portrayed in ways that were simply impossible in real life. Rintaro Tsubaki from 1963's Kuroi Himitsu Heiki was a literal descendant of the Iga ninja clan, utilizing his ninja skills to help pitch makyu for the Yomiuri Giants. Hyuma Hoshi from 1966's Star of the Giants had the Dai League Ball, which was iterated on numerous times as the opposition found ways to beat prior versions of it. Ban Banba from 1971's Samurai Giants was drafted to the Yomiuri Giants as a teenager because his makyu pitching prowess was so absurdly strong... so much so that Ban literally died on the mound in the final chapter, due to the strain pitching continual makyu put on his body. Rintaro & Hyuma were both also physically hurt by their continual makyu pitching, resulting in each of them eventually leaving the sport, so it's clear to see that gradual escalation was most certainly a thing when it came to makyu-focused baseball manga of the era. However, one manga took the makyu to its ultimate escalatory limit... and then continued to escalate things even further, in turn laying the initial foundation for what would become the modern "battle manga".
Issue #39 of Weekly Shonen Jump back in 1972 saw the debut of a brand new baseball manga titled Astro Kyudan/Astro Baseball Team, i.e. Team Astro, which came from the duo of writer Shiro Tozaki, a former freelance editor-turned-writer at Jump (the story of which is wild enough on its own), & artist Norihiro Nakajima, a relative newbie who only had two very short series under his name by that point. The manga was about a group of nine baseball players who were all born at the same exact time (9:09:09 on September 9, 1954, a.k.a. Showa 29/9/9) & had a baseball-shaped mark somewhere on their bodies. This was predicted by Eiji Sawamura, a legendary young pitching prodigy who once struck out Charlie Gehringer, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Jimmie Foxx in succession during a Japan/US exhibition game in 1934 at just the age of 17; this is actual, real-life history. Sawamura told this prophecy he had to a young boy named J. Shuro he met while stationed in the Philippines during World War II before dying in battle during the war; this is actual, real-life BS. Shuro, now a pearl magnate, has made it his goal to gather all nine of these prophesized players, the "Astro Supermen", so that he can help achieve the dream Sawamura had, one where Japan & the US fought each other not on the battlefield, but on the baseball field.
To put it simply... Team Astro is pure & unadulterated mad insanity of a manga, featuring characters (both fictional & real life, but mostly fictional) performing baseball-related feats that literally break every law of physics & common sense possible, all executed in a fashion that makes you continually wonder if what you're reading (or watching, if you were to see the sole TV adaptation of it) should even be taken seriously as a baseball story in the first place. The Astro Supermen's motto is "Isshiai Kanzen Nenshou/One Game, Full Throttle", i.e. play every game like it's the last damn thing you'll ever do in your life, & the end result is a manga where literally everything is treated as though it's life or death... and, for some characters, it actually is just that; there may not be any crying in baseball, but there is indeed dying in this manga! Team Astro would take the concept of the makyu in a direction where, quite simply, nothing could possibly follow it up, and after its 183rd chapter appeared in Issue #26 of 1976 it all came to an end, currently making it the 81st longest manga in Jump history, slotting in right between Black Cat & The Promised Neverland; it's also Jump's fifth longest baseball manga of all time. Now, roughly 50 years after that final chapter was first serialized, it's time we honor & pay our respects to the series that may have killed the makyu manga entirely (not really... but kind of, sort of) but, in doing so, opened the field for so much more.
WARNING!! This goes into spoilers regarding various part of the story of Team Astro... but, to be fair, the chances of this manga ever getting translated, official or otherwise, are the same as a professional baseball game ever surpassing 33 innings, i.e. nil. PLAY BALL!!!
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| This is a baseball manga. |
We'll start by going over the inspirations & ideals that made Team Astro what it is. The obvious one is Nanso Satomi Hakkenden, the epic novel by Kyokutei Bakin that was written from 1814 to 1842 (with Bakin going blind before he finished it, so he had to dictate the final parts to his daughter-in-law!) & starred eight people who find out that they are "Dog Warriors" who were born at the same exact time & have the same birthmark somewhere on their bodies. Upon coming together they fulfill their destined mission to protect a princess of the Satomi clan who lives in Kazusa Provine (a.k.a. Nanso), and it's very easy to see how this was a major influence on Team Astro (& many other stories from Japan, in general). In terms of personal inspirations, Shiro Tozaki has stated that a major influence on wanting to write Team Astro was seeing how apathetic Japanese society had become after the failure of the 1970 Anpo protests. The initial Anpo protests in 1960 were done in opposition to the United States–Japan Security Treaty that allows the US to maintain military bases in Japan, and while the protests didn't prevent the treaty from being renewed they did result in prime minister Nobusuke Kishi resigning, while then-US President Dwight D. Eisenhower actually cancelled a trip to Japan in response to the protests; they also helped inspire a new wave of art & literature in Japan, too. In comparison, the 1970 protests were summarily ignored by the Japanese government, which allowed the treaty to automatically renew (it's still active to this day, in fact), and Tozaki felt that this crushed a lot of the spirit of the Japanese populace. Therefore, Tozaki wanted to tell a story about a small force taking on an insurmountably large one to help inspire people, and felt that doing it through baseball would work, due to the popularity of the sport. A major throughline of Team Astro is the titular team itself wanting to be officially recognized by the Japanese professional league in order to achieve their goal of eventually taking on America's best, as the Yomiuri Giants were seen as the team to beat in Japan, though in real life they were actually nearing the end of their iconic "V9" streak of championship victories. If you're wondering why the Giants were so prolific in baseball manga during the 60s & (early) 70s, "V9" was the reason why. They, like the Red Sox, like Boston, were no longer the underdog; they were a dynasty. They had become the New York Yankees (*is punched in the face by John Cena*).
As for Norihiro Nakajima, he was seemingly the poster child for grit & determination. Growing up poor in a single-parent household, he very quickly had to learn how to help provide, whether it was delivering newspapers while in elementary school, lying about his age while in middle school in order to do manual labor during the day (he claimed that he was in high school), or initially working as a sign painter in Osaka while trying to get noticed in the manga industry making one-shots. He was a massive fan of Hiroshi Motomiya, who was essentially the golden child of Shonen Jump during its first 10+ years, & tried to follow in the steps of the man he would later call "Onii-chan/Big Brother", so it's not surprising that a major part of Nakajima's mindset when making Team Astro was to show what he felt was "A Man's Way of Life". However, there was one problem: Norihiro Nakajima didn't know the first thing about baseball. Like many pairings in manga, Nakajima was simply assigned to draw Team Astro, as the initial concept was concocted by Tozaki, so Nakajima did the only thing he could think of & contacted Noboru Kawasaki, the artist of Star of the Giants who was making Koya no Shonen Isamu for Jump at the time, for advice. Luckily for Nakajima, Kawasaki told him that it was OK that he wasn't familiar with baseball, because neither was Kawasaki when he started drawing his most iconic work. That may sound ridiculous to a modern day anime/manga fan, but I imagine Takeshi Obata knew little about go when he started drawing Hikaru no Go; sometimes you just learn on the job. In essence, as long as what Nakajima & Tozaki were making was engaging to readers & made them want to keep reading then it didn't matter if they didn't necessarily get all of the finer details of the sport correct. I mean, the Astro Supermen never have the required number of on-field players until the literal final chapter, so pedantry has no place here whatsoever; come on, do you even need a right fielder & second baseman, anyway?
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| Again... this is a baseball manga. |
As for the general outline of the manga, despite totaling 20 volumes in its original tankouban release Team Astro is comprised of only three main baseball games, plus the set up & lead in for each of them to create proper story arcs. First up is the Team Black Chapter, which sees Shuro gather together his initial set of Astro Supermen (pitcher Kyuichi Uno, catcher Kyuji Ueno, first baseman Kyuzaburo Ijuin, third baseman Kyugo Miogino, & the mismatched twin pair of left fielder Kyushichi & center fielder Kyuhachi Akechi) before they take on Team Black, a "revenge team" comprised of players who each have a vendetta against the Giants. Most notably from Team Black are Kyuroku "Razor Dragon" Takao & Nashi Mu, who both have a penchant for batting or pitching in ways that cause harm to those who pitch or bat against them, respectively. Nashi Mu also happened to be born at the same time as the Astro Supermen, making him a potential candidate to join them. After that is the Lotte Orions Chapter where, after Shuro unveils the brand new & technologically modern (for the time, at least) Astro Stadium, professional team the Lotte Orions (now the Chiba Lotte Marines) reveal that they have a pair of secret weapons that can defeat the Astro Supermen, so a challenge is made where if the Orions win they get exclusive franchise rights to the stadium for a year. Since this is a real-life team the manga utilized the line-up of the actual 1972/1973 Lotte Orions, including former MLB players Jim Lefebvre & the late George Altman, though manager Masaichi Kaneda's "secret weapons" were fictional players. In particular, there were the giant Monster Joe & the impressive Ryo Sakamoto (another superman candidate born at the same time) who would give the Astro Supermen trouble, with Kyuroku coming late in the game to join his destined brothers as a new (& honorable) member of the team, playing shortstop.
Finally, & most importantly, there's the Team Victory Chapter, which sees the Astro Supermen challenged by Kyushiro Touge, who normally would be the Astro's brother-in-arms but instead despises them for representing what he feels is a destiny predetermined for him. Therefore, with some (forced) funding from the Giants, Kyushiro forms Team Victory, a super-team comprised of the best Japanese athletes from various sports, as well as three key players: pitcher Shinjiro Ujiie, a WWII kamikaze pilot who never got to accomplish his mission due to the war ending; third baseman Baron Mori, Kyushiro's best friend who can push himself to superhuman-like levels; & first baseman Daimon Ijuin, Kyuzaburo's older brother who now wants nothing more than to kill his younger brother, due to their own tragic past. It doesn't take long for the Team Astro vs. Team Victory game to be declared a literal "deathmatch", where the goal is to win by any means necessary, even if it kills their opponents in the process... or themselves. The ninth & final Astro Superman, Kyukuro Hino, debuts late into this final game but never actually plays, a victim of the manga ending shortly after this third & final game finishes up. Like many Jump manga, Team Astro's finale looks to have been a circumstance of eventual cancellation due to fan interest dying down, though it does at least have a proper conclusion, for the most part.
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| Excellent batting form from Kyuroku, perfectly befitting a baseball manga. |
Team Astro is a series all about escalation... and that's first seen by making note of how long these three games last in the manga. The Team Black Chapter, from the manga's debut to the end of the game, is 25 weekly chapters long, with the game itself taking only eight chapters; OK, fair enough for a first game. The Lotte Orions Chapter takes up the next 53 weekly chapters, with the game itself taking 39 chapters; that makes sense, since our heroes are now taking on an actual professional team. The Team Victory Chapter... takes up the remaining 103 weekly chapters, longer than the prior two arcs combined, with the game itself taking 76 chapters. Yes, the third & final game of Team Astro alone took nearly 1.5 years to fully serialize & makes up ~41.5% of the entire manga! If you thought Shohoku vs. Sannoh in Slam Dunk, the final game of that manga, took a long time to tell (52 weekly chapters, or just over six books, i.e. the end of Volume 25 through 31), then you ain't seen nothing yet with the Team Astro vs. Team Victory game, which in its original collected form took up nine books, i.e. Volumes 12 to 20. If we include all of the post-Lotte Orions game set-up for the game itself that adds another 2.5 volumes, i.e. the second half of Volume 9 through 20!
In case you're wondering why I kept saying "weekly chapters", it's because the collected releases combined chapters together, which was the style at the time, resulting in a new total of 99 chapters; if you couldn't tell, the number "9" is really important to this series. It's also worth noting that in the February 1977 issue of Monthly Shonen Jump a bonus Team Astro story was published, Duel! Japan & U.S. Superman Baseball, that took place after the manga & saw the Astro Supermen pinch play for the Giants against the fictional American team the Miracle Bombers, led by the mysterious Dragon Magnum. This bonus story was part of the "Timeless Masterpiece Series" Monthly Jump was doing at the time, which were new one-shots based on classic manga drawn by their original creators, including Tetsujin 28, Harenchi Gakuen, Astro Boy, Cyborg 009, Obake no Q-Taro, Osomatsu-kun, The Gutsy Frog, Akuma-kun, & Boku no Dobutsuen Nikki; talk about an eclectic line-up.
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| See? There's a bat & ball! This is clearly a baseball manga!! Also, the person seen here is Tetsuharu Kawakami, the "God of Batting" |
Unlike prior makyu-focused baseball manga that starred pitchers who had to improve over the course of their stories, the Astro Superman are all already literal supermen in their abilities, and while someone like Kyuichi does work on creating new makyu in order to surpass his foes & rivals, they're already performing ridiculous feats from the start. For example, the giant Kyuhachi is already seen at the start of the manga launching his diminutive twin Kyushichi high into the air, exponentially beyond the leaping power of any human, to catch fly balls that would otherwise be clear home runs. So how can this manga possibly escalate things even further? It does so by being willing to throw almost any & all sense of logic out the door so that truly anything is possible, emphasizing the motto of the Astro Supermen themselves: "One Game, Full Throttle". Pitchers like Kyuichi, Nashi Mu, & Shinjiro can effectively do whatever they want with a baseball, whether it's go on absurdly long curves that defy the laws of physics (the Skylab Pitch), seemingly disappear before reaching the batter, only to reappear in time for the catcher (the Prismatic Breaking Ball), make sudden drops that go against the laws of inertia (the Triple Drop), or even wind their way down the opposing batter's bat, like a snake, before leaping up at the batter's face (the Killer L-Shaped Pitch, as seen above). Shinjiro, in particular, was known for his beanball-style makyu, aiming directly at the batter for maximum damage, even if it has to break through a swung bat to do so.
But the very concept of the makyu was not just restricted to pitches in this series, as now batting & even defense could be done in ways that were impossible in real life. Kyuichi had the Giacobini Meteor Shower Swing, where he'd purposefully crack a wooden bat before going to plate, so that when he hit the ball the bat would shatter, creating multiple ball-like objects in the sky & making those on the outfield essentially play a guessing game to determine which was the real ball. Kyugo & Kyuroku went to plate with the likes of the Acceleration Swing, the Ultra Shot Swing, the Killer X Swing, the Kohoutek Comet Swing, & the Andromeda Nebula Swing, with Norihiro Nakajima using visual accentuation to emphasize the sheer power of these moves by drawing things like comets, galaxies, planets, & all manner of astronomical imagery. As for defensive maneuvers there's something like the Astro Shift, where Kyuroku & Kyuzaburo run back & forth between their respective bases & second so fast that they create an impenetrable barrier for line drives, while both Kyuichi (after pitching) & Kyushichi stand on Kyuhachi's shoulders so as to being able to catch fly balls. Easily one of the most iconic moments during the Team Victory match is the Human Niagara, where Daimon & a bunch of his fellow Team Victory players leap high into the air after Kyuzaburo hits a grounder, creating a cascade of overhead aerial attacks that Kyuzaburo has to either avoid or tank, all while making his way to first base. Again, by this point the game had been declared a literal deathmatch, & Daimon wanted his little brother dead more than anything.
Sure, this sometimes resulted in blatant breaking of the rules that the story otherwise ignored. Kyuroku directly interferes with the Orion's Kimiyasu Murakami catching a ball to prevent an out, which is blatantly illegal. The Skylab Pitch is a two-stage maneuver where Kyuichi tosses the ball up into the air first before slapping it with his palm towards the batter, which technically makes it a balk. After sending the ball flying so hard & fast that it seemingly disappears with his Vanishing Hit, Sakamoto refuses to run the bases after hitting a home run... and the umpire lets him get away with it; honestly, I could keep going, but I'll stop there. Clearly, following the exact rules of baseball wasn't a detail that was important to Shiro Tozaki & Norihiro Nakajima. However, when the manga already established itself as being utterly impossible to replicate from the very beginning you can forgive moments like these for the sake of entertainment value; I mean, none of these games in this series are technically "officially" sanctioned pro baseball matches, anyway. Plus, Jump had various other baseball manga running alongside Team Astro, like the much more realistic Play Ball & (later) Akutare Giants, so if readers during the 70s wanted something more grounded (ha!) then they had alternate options to read.
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| OK, enough of that gag... but, seriously, this is a baseball manga. |
Returning back to the creators themselves, they actually each had their own interesting stories behind the scenes when it came to making Team Astro, so let's start with Shiro Tozaki. Born in 1943, Tozaki first worked as a substitute teacher before finding work at Shueisha as a freelance editor for Weekly Shonen Jump in its earliest days. Sometime around 1970, though, the editors at Shueisha formed a union & decided to make Tozaki their chairman, but a major roadblock came the form of Tadasu Nagano. Nagano had been with Shueisha ever since 1951 & when Shonen Jump launched in 1968 he was named its first ever Editor-in-Chief, with Nagano being the man who made "Friendship, Effort, Victory" into the magazine's entire motto & editorial policy, after first using it for the magazine's precursor, Shonen Book. Nagano was also a very shrewd man, too, having been the one who conceived of Jump's notorious practice of signing new mangaka to timed exclusivity deals, as well as the magazine's cutthroat habit of cancelling manga if reader surveys aren't positive enough, both of which are still done at Jump to this very day. Nagano was also a bit of a conflictory man, as while he was very anti-war after his experiences in WWII (he was a big supporter of Barefoot Gen's time in Jump, and after he left the magazine in 1974 the manga was cut) he was also very anti-union; Shigeo Nishimura, an editor at Jump during that time would later describe Nagano as "left-wing in spirit, right-wing in action". Nagano's disdain for unions, though, would eventually result in him forcing Shiro Tozaki to resign entirely from the editorial staff. That same staff felt bad for Tozaki, though, so when Tozaki told Nishimura that he was interested in being a writer he was re-hired... without anyone officially telling Shueisha.
Well, OK, this is where things get a bit weird, as while Tozaki did make his debut as a manga writer later in 1970 under a pen name (Shiro Sugi, with completely different kanji for "Shiro"), he quickly dropped all pretense starting in 1971, so by the time Team Astro debuted in 1972 Tozaki was using his actual name on the cover of Jump itself; talking about hiding in plain sight. Regardless, Shigeo Nishimura would admit in his 1999 book Manga Editing Techniques, where he goes over various anecdotes about his time working at Jump, that Tozaki's rehiring was kept a secret (somehow...) until Team Astro truly became popular, with the editorial staff trying to play it off like a joke. Unfortunately, this resulted in Shiro Tozaki being taken off of Team Astro, though his name remained as author for copyright reasons, so he's continued to make money off of it. There has never been any exact time frame as to when Tozaki was removed from the manga, but if we look at Jajanken's page for Team Astro (which charts the Table of Contents "performance" for each issue it appeared in) we can see that it started getting regularly color-paged chapters & consistently early magazine placement around mid-1974 or so, right around the time the Lotte Orions game had ended & the story moved into the set up for the Team Victory game; if anything, that might be around the point Tozaki was removed. It's hard to tell if Tozaki being taken off of Team Astro was a decision made by Tadasu Nagano or not, but considering that Nagano would leave Jump a few months later, as well as the fact that Tozaki would eventually be allowed to return to Jump from 1976 to 1979, it is entirely possible that Tozaki's second "departure" might have been one of Tadasu Nagano's final big moves prior to him leaving the magazine himself, & Tozaki was brought back in (again) once Team Astro was over. Again, I have absolutely no idea how Tozaki survived for as long as he did without hiding his identity from Nagano & Shueisha, but that's the actual story, from all indications.
Hey, at least Tozaki was removed for (quite honestly) petty reasons, instead of far worse & (to put it nicely) "problematic" reasons that Jump has had in later decades.
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| これは野球漫画です。 OK, now I'm truly done with this gag. |
So with Tozaki gone, how would Team Astro continue on? Easy, editor Hiroki Goto would step into the role & help Norihiro Nakajima out with the rest of the manga! Joining Shueisha in 1970 after graduating from college, Goto was pretty much the first "homegrown" member of Jump's editorial staff, as all prior editors were Shonen Book alumni, & he was the man who found Nakajima & gave him his first chances in Jump. Since Goto himself wasn't a writer by trade he decided to do something interesting: He & Nakajima would dictate what to do next based on reader surveys & questionnaires. While they had been used (& are still used to this day) to determine things like popularity & whether or not a series would continue running or get the axe, this looks to have been the first time a manga itself was written based specifically on what the readers themselves liked & didn't like about it. This would likely help explain a lot of the sheer insanity seen in the second half of Team Astro. Kyuichi grabs a rotary drill press by the bit while it was in operation so that he could scar his hand in order to throw a new makyu. Daimon commits literal seppuku in private before hitting a grand slam as a way to repent for his horrible actions against Kyuzaburo & redeem himself. Baron pushes himself to the point where he bleeds out of every cranial orifice possible before dying in Kyushiro's arms; however, Baron still makes sure to touch home base before dying, so that his team can score a point. Alongside stuff like the Human Niagara & the Astro Shift, some of the stuff in Team Astro's second half very much feels like Goto & Nakajima thinking up whatever they could to keep the manga continually interesting &, most importantly, unpredictable to readers... above seemingly anything else.
By all definitions of common sense this idea should have led to Team Astro dying a quick death... but, if you look at the chart over on Jajanken, the gambit paid off. Team Astro would become an immensely popular series for Shonen Jump from the second half of 1974 all the way through the entirety of 1975, & looked to be the most popular baseball manga running in Jump at that time. Not just that, but the blind-but-handsome Kyuzaburo became immensely popular with female readers, with his tragic rivalry with Daimon tugging at fans' heartstrings; in fact, Kyuzaburo is the only Astro Superman to really be given a detailed backstory. This all resulted in Kyuzaburo often being the character used whenever Team Astro got the cover for an issue of Jump, more so than Kyuichi, who was arguably the "main character"; Kyuzaburo would go on to be seen as the first true "pretty boy" character in Shonen Jump. Also, to be perfectly honest, whenever anyone brings up Team Astro, 99% of the time it's about the stuff seen in the latter half with Team Victory, i.e. after Tozaki was removed & the Nakajima/Goto pair relied on reader responses; out of all the imagery I'm showing here, only two come from the Tozaki-written part of the manga. Shigeo Nishimura would later cite Goto & Nakajima's reliance on reader surveys & questionnaires as "The Origin of Creating Manga at Weekly Jump", and that concept is still utilized at the magazine to this very day, for both good & ill. As for how the Goto/Nakajima pairing worked out, there were certainly complications. It's entirely possible that Goto let out his general frustrations as an editor on Nakajima more than he would have preferred, since he was still acting as the editor for other people's manga while also helping create Team Astro, and there is one anecdote of Goto getting so mad at Nakajima for drawing such a terrible storyboard that he allegedly whacked Nakajima in the head with a roll of tracing paper. One would imagine that Goto also felt personally responsible for any of Nakajima's faults & blunders, since he was the man who discovered Nakajima in the first place & brought him to Jump. Still, from all indications, their relationship remained amicable all the way to the very end, despite the rough spots.
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| You see why I did the gag... RIGHT?! |
And then there's Norihiro Nakajima... who, from all reports & indications, was a real life follower of "One Game, Full Throttle" when it came to how he made manga. Born on July 12, 1950, he was an artist who seemingly never gave anything less than his absolute most when it came to drawing manga, and I think the artwork I've shared in this piece showcases the talent he had. Yes, I'm emphasizing the most ridiculous, absurd, & insane moments, but Nakajima's talent was undeniable & helps makes these moments hit all the harder. However, when combined with the weekly grind of Shonen Jump, Nakajima was known to push himself to ridiculous degrees while making Team Astro, so much so that it affected him physically. As admitted in works created by both Shinji Hiramatsu (who was an assistant to Nakajima during Team Astro's serialization) & Keiichi Tanaka (who interviewed Nakajima's son), Nakajima suffered from various health problems while making Team Astro, including vomiting, hives, & spot baldness due to how much he pushed himself. The most legendary story was that he once was so late on delivering a manuscript for a chapter that the printing presses literally had to stop, with Nakajima both prostrating himself in front of the editorial staff in apology, & (allegedly) signing an actual blood oath to never miss a deadline again. The stress got so bad, in fact, that Nakajima wound up having both his hands & even head swell, resulting in Team Astro needing to go on a month-long hiatus in mid-1975, during its height of popularity, so that he could recover. Nakajima's stressful & strenuous way of making manga would eventually be what led to his early retirement, but we'll go over that later on.
However, what makes Team Astro so important today, 50 years after the final chapter first appeared in Shonen Jump, is its historical relevance. On the one hand, Team Astro wound up being the "final inning" for the makyu in baseball manga, as after its finale in 1976 the idea of baseball manga where the players performed superhuman feats during games, & threw pitches that were quite literally impossible to duplicate in real life, more or less died out. The reason for this came about via two different directions baseball manga wound up going during Team Astro's run, as well as not long after it came to an end. First was the rise of baseball gag manga, which first came to be in the mid-70s with titles like 1975-1978's 1・2 no Ahho!! by Kontaro, which ran alongside Team Astro in Shonen Jump, but especially caught fire with 1977-1980's Susume!! Pirates by Hisashi Eguchi, which debuted in Jump after Team Astro had ended. Where Ahho!! was essentially a gag manga that just happened to star a (two-person) baseball team, Pirates was a full-on baseball comedy about the (fictional) worst team in the professional league. In fact, the fictional Chiba Pirates were so notoriously bad that when the real-life Lotte Orions moved to Chiba in 1992 & held a fan vote for a new team name, they literally turned down "Pirates" (which had won second place) purely because of Susume!! Pirates; yes, a real-life team was terrified of having the same name as a fictional team. Meanwhile, over at Shogakukan, Mitsuru Adachi was making a name for himself with 1978-1980's Nine, followed by the iconic Touch in 1981, which focused more on the relationships that people can make via baseball than the literal games & techniques that are performed within. Moving forward, baseball manga would follow to lead of people like Mitsuru Adachi (or the late Akio Chiba, creator of Captain & Play Ball during the 70s) & put a primary focus on the "human drama" element of baseball. Makyu would still occasionally be seen in baseball manga after Team Astro, but generally either as a direct reference/homage to those older works or done as a parody that poked fun at how ridiculous it could get.
The only real exception would be 1996's Dreams by the late writer Taro Nami (a.k.a. Shigeyuki Chiba, the youngest brother of the legendary Tetsuya Chiba) & artist Sanbachi Kawa (a former assistant to Tetsuya Chiba), which fully embraced the makyu concept & expanded on it with theoretical concepts that didn't exist back in the 70s, like sports scientist Kazushi Tezuka's idea of synchronized batting. Dreams would run until 2017 & total 71 volumes, ending only because of the cancellation of the magazine it ran in, Kodansha's Magazine Special (after first running in Weekly Shonen Magazine until 2003). Still, Dreams has essentially been the only real successor to the makyu-focused manga of old, & likely was designed specifically as a throwback, rather than a direct attempt at making the concept work in modern times.
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| No snarky gag or comment to make here. This image just rules. |
Team Astro would wind up clearing the field when it came to makyu-focused baseball manga, but in doing so it actually laid the foundation for what would come next. Easily the most notable & direct influence would come by way of a mangaka named Masami Kurumada, who had seen Team Astro's early days while working as an assistant on Samurai Giants, before making his own professional debut in Jump in 1974 with the series Sukeban Arashi, right as Team Astro was entering its true heyday. Roughly half a year after Team Astro's final chapter came out Kurumada would debut his second serialization, Ring ni Kakero, in "early 1977", and while his boxing manga initially started off as more of a character drama inspired by Ashita no Joe about 1.5 years into its run Kurumada decided to change things up. He started putting more emphasis on RnK's two primary characters (rivals/friends Ryuji Takane & Jun Kenzaki) being more skilled & powerful than their youthful ages would make them seem, with Ryuji in particular learning how to harness that strength into a powerful left hook that would be called the Boomerang Hook. Over time Kurumada would introduce new rivals-turned-allies for Ryuji, and they would also start getting special named attacks, like Kazuki Shinatora's Rolling Thunder (where he punched three, & later five, times in a row in the span of less than a second) or Ishimatsu Katori's Hurricane Bolt (where he'd leap high into the air for a gravity-empowered punch from above), and by the time the World Tournament happened in mid-1979 pretty much every notable character in the series had what was called a "Superblow".
Superblows were immensely powerful punches with unique names (Jet Upper, Cosa Nostra, Devil Propose, Black Screw, God Dimension, Dead Symphony, Neo Bible, etc.) that either saw Kurumada utilize visual accentuation to emphasize their presence (a la what Nakajima did in Team Astro) or literally did the impossible, like razor sharp wind gusts for long-range attacks or punching with such ferocity that even a complete miss could still create a wind gust powerful enough to leave a crater in a concrete wall. Easily the two most iconic Superblows seen in RnK would be Kenzaki's pair of Galactica Magnum & Galactica Phantom, with the former being portrayed as delivering the force of a supernova, while the latter was often seen using the image of a planet-filled galaxy as its backdrop... similar to the image just above from Team Astro. Yes, Kurumada took heavy inspiration from Team Astro when he transitioned RnK into the superpowered boxing spectacle that it would be best known as, and you can find various moments where Kurumada just outright paid direct homage (or blatantly copied, if you're the cynical type) the baseball manga via certain imagery & outfits seen in both series; even the relationship between Kenzaki & Shadow Sousui was a take on Kyuzaburo & Daimon Ijuin. Essentially, Kurumada took the concept of the makyu that Team Astro more or less brought an end to & transitioned it into the world of boxing, where "Sunday punches" (as they're referred to in real life) now became "Superblows", and in doing so created what Shueisha would eventually call in 2014 the "Hot-Blooded Fighting Manga Bible". While Team Astro would simply lay the foundation, Ring ni Kakero would become the blueprint, the literal "bible", for what is now the modern shonen action "battle manga". RnK would be a direct influence & inspiration on future works, or simply the bar for other manga to follow or surpass, including Kinnikuman, Captain Tsubasa, Fist of the North Star, & Dragon Ball, with the latter two expanding the influence & inspiration even further out by leaving the sports genre entirely... and, in some way, it all can go back to Team Astro taking the concept of the makyu to its absolute limit as simply a thing meant for baseball manga.
But it wasn't just Ring ni Kakero that would pay homage & respect to Team Astro, as other works & creators have either been inspired & influenced by it, or even simply made a reference to it. For example, Captain Tsubasa has the Tachibana Twins (Masao & Kazuo), who eventually come up with a special technique where one lays on the ground & uses their legs as a launching pad for the other, in order to go high up in the air to either catch a flying soccer ball or kick it elsewhere as a pass to a teammate or a shot at the goal. The name of this move? Skylab Hurricane, a combination reference to both Kyuichi Uno's Skylab Pitch & Ishimatsu Katori's Hurricane Bolt, while the technique itself is seemingly a direct reference to when Kyuhachi, Kyugo, & Kyuzaburo perform a three-stage launch in order to catch a fly ball, after Kyushichi injures his Achilles' tendon. While Team Astro most certainly broke too many of the rules (both what were already established, as well as what would later become established standards) to be what Ring ni Kakero would wind up being, i.e. the "bible" of the modern day shonen action manga, it arguably did what needed to be done by taking the makyu to such an extreme that no other baseball manga could ever possibly exceed it, effectively ending an entire sub-genre of sports manga. However, in doing so it opened the field to other sports, like wrestling & soccer, which in turn eventually led to a more generalized style of action to take hold, as seen with Fuma no Kojirou, Fist of the North Star, & Dragon Ball. Plus, the concept of the makyu has continued to be seen in later sports anime & manga that are known for their wild & crazy techniques, like The Prince of Tennis, Kuroko's Basketball, Birdie Wing, Hayame Blast Gear, & even (to a small extent) Hajime no Ippo.
Another notable person that was personally inspired by this series was Hideaki Anno, the creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion, who admitted in his essay for Volume 1 of Ohta Publishing's 1999 re-release of Team Astro (which collected everything, including the bonus Monthly Jump story, across five 700+-page omnibuses) that he initially read some of the manga as a kid back in the 70s, but didn't find it interesting. However, while working on Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water with Gainax in 1990, he came across a complete set of the tankouban release on clearance at a bookstore that was closing up & decided to give Team Astro another go, nearly 20 years later. This time around he wound up absolutely loving the series, with the motto of "One Game, Full Throttle" in particular inspiring him. Sure, the concept of "putting everything you have into everything you ever do" is literally impossible in real life, but it was the simple sentiment of that motto, the ideology behind it, that stuck with Anno moving forward. He admitted that Evangelion was later made with the idea that he would put every part of him that he possibly could into it, just as the Astro Supermen did in every game they played, and the end result is what's still considered one of the greatest anime ever made. In that same essay Anno admitted that, by that point, he could only give his all into one more production (Ohta's first omnibus came out right as the His & Her Circumstances TV anime was ending, which Anno notoriously had issues working on after a point), and I imagine one could argue that the Rebuild of Evangelion movie series would wind up being the last time Anno could truly follow the Astro Supermen's motto of "One Game, Full Throttle".
If you're curious, the other people who provided essays for Ohta's re-release of Team Astro were Masami Kurumada in Volume 2, manga writer Kentaro Takekuma (Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga, Super Mario Adventures) in Volume 3, actor/comedian Hikaru Ijuin (who admitted that his stage last name is taken directly from Kyuzaburo & Daimon) in Volume 4, & Hiroki Goto in Volume 5, as well as the expected shorter essays by Shiro Tozaki & Norihiro Nakajima.
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| Likely the closest Team Astro will ever get to an anime adaptation. |
Now you might be wondering, "If Team Astro is seemingly so important, then where's the anime adaptation?", and that'd be a fair thing to wonder from a modern perspective, since just about any popular Jump manga gets an anime nowadays. However, Team Astro ran in Weekly Shonen Jump during a time when the magazine was actually rather hesitant when it came to approving TV anime adaptations, as Shueisha was seemingly worried that if people could simply watch their favorite Jump manga on TV then they wouldn't buy issues of the magazine to read them; remember, anime was initially named "TV manga" in the early days. While this may sound patently absurd from a modern lens, & there were numerous TV anime adaptations of manga during that time, the 70s in anime were admittedly mostly defined by original works, or at least IPs designed as a media mix (see: pretty much anything with Go Nagai's name on it). To wit, there were literally only four TV anime adaptations of Jump manga up through the 70s, namely Otoko Ippiki Gaki Daisho, The Gutsy Frog, Koya no Shonen Isamu, & Samurai Giants; Kurenai Sanshiro/Judo Boy & Mazinger Z also existed, but those were designed as media mix productions from the start. Indeed, the vast majority of Jump's earliest hit manga have never been adapted into TV anime, including Harenchi Gakuen, Toilet Hakase, Obora Ichidai, Circuit no Okami, Onna Darake, Hochonin Ajihei, 1・2 no Ahho!!, Doberman Cop, Boku no Dobutsuen Nikki, Susume!! Pirates, Sawayaka Mantaro, Hole in One, Tennis Boy... and Team Astro. If you go solely off of TV anime adaptations then it looks like Shonen Jump had nothing popular in the 70s, but that obviously wasn't be the case. It wouldn't be until the anime adaptation of Dr. Slump in 1981, which became a smash hit & cultural touchstone in Japan, that Shueisha started truly embracing the idea of adapting Jump manga into TV anime, and by that point Team Astro was long over. Hell, Masami Kurumada apparently admitted that by the time he was initially interested in a TV anime of Ring ni Kakero, after turning down offers in the late 70s, it was as his manga was finishing up in 1981, and therefore no one else was interested by that point; after all, why promote something that has nothing new coming out? In fact, there have only been five Jump manga which debuted back in the 70s that have been given TV anime adaptations since 1981: Space Adventure Cobra, Kinnikuman, Kochikame, Ring ni Kakero 1, & Play Ball; of those, only RnK1 & Play Ball were adapted decades after their serializations had ended.
However, an attempt to adapt Team Astro into a TV anime was in fact made in 1992, likely to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the manga's debut. Group TAC, the now defunct studio behind anime like Touch, the Street Fighter II Movie, & Night on the Galactic Railroad, wrote up an eight-page pitch that it ran by multiple TV networks, with the plan being to modernize the story so that it took place in the early 90s, including changing the birthyear of the Astro Supermen to 1974 (Showa 49), & moving Astro Stadium from Shinjuku to a bay near Odaiba. Yes, it is all sorts of amusing that the studio that made the iconic Touch anime wanted to adapt the manga that was a part the kind of baseball manga that titles like Touch itself supplanted. Group TAC even produced two "still cel prototype" images that showed what the anime could possibly look like, as seen above, showing that Nakajima's art style would have been adapted to animation rather well. Unfortunately, no networks bit on Group TAC's pitch & the attempt died a quiet death, not becoming known to the public until 1999 when Ohta released Team Astro Memorial, a book that came out alongside its re-release of the manga & included scans of both the still cel images & the original pitch documents. The reasoning behind the pitch's failure were chalked up to the proliferation of the OVA right at that time (which was ironic, as the OVA would harshly drop in popularity after 1992, due to the bubble economy bursting), as well as a general lack of know-how & interest in baseball anime airing on TV in the years since the last one to have aired, 1989-1990's Miracle Giants Dome-kun, finished up; ironically, Dome-kun was a baseball series that featured makyu. There wouldn't be another baseball anime to debut on Japanese TV until H2 in 1995, an adaptation of Mitsuru Adachi's spiritual follow-up to Touch, which only adds to the irony; however, Group TAC didn't make the H2 anime, as Ashi Pro did that one.
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| This is where the terms "Team Astro" & "One Game, Full Throttle" come from. |
However, Team Astro would eventually receive an adaptation... and it even saw an official English release, though barely anyone knew about it being available. On July 25, 2005 the now-defunct satellite subscription channel Perfect Choice debuted the first episode of a live-action TV adaptation of Team Astro, one made up of nine hour-long episodes that were then cut in half & started airing on TV Asahi as an 18-episode series on August 10, 2005. Unlike Group TAC's attempted anime, this live-action series (which, for all intents & purposes, was as much a tokusatsu series as it was a "J-Drama", due to all of the special effects needed to showcase the feats performed) was a period peace that maintained the 70s era of the original manga, though the story itself was treated as a recollection by an elderly J. Shuro in then-modern times; by the by, Shuro was played by, I kid you not, the late Sonny Chiba! Naturally, with only what amounts to 18 "traditional" length episodes there's no way that this adaptation covers everything in the manga, & in fact the manga excises the Team Black Chapter in its entirety, though to still make sure Kyuroku initially being a rival player is included he was moved over to the Lotte Orions, in place of Ryo Sakamoto; Kyuroku was also given the Killer L-Shaped Pitch, since Nashi Mu was not in this adaptation, either. However, what is directly taken from the manga is done so extremely well, and there's an earnest execution in maintaining as much of the visual insanity as possible via live-action, with the special effects & CG usage emphasizing those moments well. Also, this utilizes some snippets of animation for the short OP sequence, with Production I.G. hired for this (sorry, Group TAC), and those animation clips (plus some new ones) were then used for the intro & highlight reels for TV Asahi's Super Baseball broadcast of actual pro games for a few years, during which the broadcast had the subtitle Pro Yakyu Kanzen Nenshou Shugi/Pro Baseball's Full Throttle Philosophy. Even the music is a standout, in particular Dohatsuten's take on the "Team Astro Cheer Song" that first appeared in the manga during the Lotte Orions game; Dohatsuten even repurposed it in 2018 for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters.
Overall, the live-action adaptation of Team Astro is an excellent show & a great way to experience the series for newcomers, especially those who enjoy tokusatsu & its penchant for the occasional moment of visual zaniness. However, I did mention that this adaptation was actually officially available in English at one point, and that came by way of the now-defunct site DramaFever, which was around from 2009 to 2018 & focused primarily on being the official English streaming home for various K-Dramas, some of which were adaptations of Japanese manga. However, DramaFever also got the rights to a small handful of Japanese live-action shows in 2010, mainly titles that had already been made available with English subs before, and Team Astro happened to be one of the titles the site offered, in what looked to be its one & only actual exclusive when it came to Japanese content. To be honest, I imagine DramaFever only got this show as part of a larger package deal, because while all of Team Astro's live-action adaptation was available to watch with English subtitles... said subs were absolutely terrible. The translation itself was decent enough to understand the broad strokes of the story, but literally every single name was mangled beyond belief, with all of the Astro Supermen simply being referred to as "Astro [#]", while their last names were just completely wrong (like "Astro One Yunoki" instead of Kyuichi Uno); even Monster Joe, who speaks only in English, had his subs mangled! This is how I first experienced Team Astro, & I even reviewed this show back in 2011, but by mid-2015 the show left DramaFever entirely, likely due to an expired license. It was also made available on Viki for a few years that went beyond DramaFever's time offering it, but since Viki relied on crowd-sourced subs at the time nothing more than the first hour-long episode ever got subbed there... and only 81% of it, at best. Unfortunately, I highly doubt that Team Astro's 2005 live-action adaptation will ever be given another chance, and considering the general infamy most live-action TV from Japan tends to have when it comes to international licensing (mainly due to approvals being needed for the actors) it's a miracle that it was ever available in English at all.
Beyond that the only other "adaptation" of Team Astro was a video game for the PlayStation 2 from 2005 by Sunrise Interactive (& technically made in relation to the live-action series, despite it being based on the manga & featuring its own cast for the voice actors) that's really more of a "Best of the Team Victory Game" showcase done via various mini-games. It is enjoyable for what it is, though, & Atsushi Imaruoka (Stroheim from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure TV) absolutely killed it as Kyuichi, screaming his head off for almost every voiced line like he's a damn banshee. There was also a pachislot machine, with the model name Moero Astro Kyudan 2 (no, I don't know of a "first" model), from JPS in 2007 that focused solely on the Team Black game (though now with [a rather dark-skinned] Kyuroku playing alongside his brethren)... but pachislot-only adaptations of anime & manga is a depressing thing to think about. As you can see above, the pachislot machine features a wholly different anime style for the cast from both Group TAC's "phantom" anime & even Production I.G.'s anime bits from the live-action series, but I have no idea which studio produced the bits of animation for the machine. However, watching a promo video for it shows that Atsushi Imaruoka possibly returned to voiced Kyuichi, while Dohatsuten's iconic take on the "Team Astro Cheer Song" was also included, so at least there were some small victories.
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| A good reminder that even the Tozaki-written part of the manga has its visual highlights, because this shot of Ryo Sakamoto is awesome. |
I think we should end this whole thing with a "Where Are They Now?" bit, because there were a lot of real life people involved in the story behind Team Astro. As mentioned, Shiro Tozaki continued to write manga, working with a wide variety of artists (including Motoro Mase, Kazuyoshi Kawai, & the late Jiro Taniguchi), & eventually saw another big hit with Zero: The Man of Creation, a series about a master forger which Tozaki wrote under the name Eishi Ai with artist Kei Satomi over at Super Jump from 1991 to 2011 for a total of 78 volumes; Shiro Tozaki is still alive as of this piece, but at age 83 looks to be fully retired. As for Norihiro Nakajima, after finishing Team Astro his next major work would be 1977-1979's Asataro-den, also in Shonen Jump, a solo work about a young boy wanting to become a proper man after learning from an ex-yakuza who finished a stint in jail; it would total 11 volumes. After Asataro-den Nakajima would continue making manga, including a return to baseball with the short-lived Nekkyu Suikoden in late 1979, but on August 2, 1985 suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, seemingly a consequence of his intense & body-damaging way of making manga. Outside of three short-run titles between 1988 & 1991, & a single one-shot in 1998, Nakajima effectively retired following that incident, spending the rest of his days (according to his son) watching TV & reading the newspaper in peace before passing away on August 28, 2014 of colon cancer at the age of 64. Nakajima also had a number of assistants under him during his time making manga who would go on to have notable manga careers of their own, including Shinji Hiramatsu (Doberman Cop, Black Angels), Terushi Sato (Edomae no Shun, which has been running since 1999), & Motoka Murakami (Musashi no Ken, Jin), so his legacy continues on in some way.
Tadasu Nagano left Weekly Shonen Jump in 1974 to become managing director of Shueisha before retiring in 1992. In an issue of Hakuoh Law Review Nagano would be quoted as saying that "Jump is shabby manga," & that while rivals Sunday & Magazine are open to anything all Jump is willing to offer to readers is "onigiri", referring to the very motto of "Friendship, Effort, Victory" that he himself enforced & codified for the magazine from the very start; again, a very conflictory man. After retiring Nagano would go on to write poetry, both short & epic in length, before dying of esophageal cancer on November 24, 2001 at the age of 75. Shigeo Nishimura would become Shonen Jump's third Editor-in-Chief in 1978, being the man in charge of the magazine as it transitioned into what would be "The Golden Age of Jump", before finally leaving the position in 1986 to become the founding EiC for Super Jump, and from 1989 to 1994 he was high-ranking executive at Shueisha before retiring. Nishimura is credited as the man who found Hiroshi Motomiya back in the late 60s, helped teach Buronson how to write manga in the early 70s, & personally helped persuade the parents of Takashi Shimada & Yoshinori Nakai, i.e. Yudetamago, to let them sign with Jump, which led to the debut of Kinnikuman; in many ways, Shigeo Nishimura is one of the most important figures in Jump's history. Alongside 1999's Manga Editing Techniques, Nishimura wrote two other books about his time at Jump & Shueisha, 1994's Farewell, Shonen Jump of My Youth & 1998's The Collapse of the Manga Kingdom (the latter of which was written as a fictionalized story), before passing away in May of 2015 of unspecified causes at around the age of 78. Finally, Hiroki Goto would go on to be the editor for popular titles like Doberman Cop & Cat's Eye before eventually becoming Jump's fourth EiC (& the magazine's first "homegrown" one) in 1986, after Shigeo Nishimura, overseeing most of the latter half of Jump's Golden Age. Goto would leave the position in 1993 before later becoming a director at Shueisha & eventually rising all the way up to representative director for the entire company before retiring in 2012. In March of 2018 Goto's memoir, Shonen Jump: The Golden Miracle, was published & he's still alive as of this piece at around 81 years old.
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| When you think the edibles hit... only to then realize that what you actually ate was poisonous & you're about to die. |
Quite honestly, I could just go on & on & on & on about Team Astro, listing off the various bits of pure madcap insanity seen within its pages (or episodes, if you see the live-action adaptation), because while I've certainly already mentioned & shown a ton already I've only just scratched the surface of what's housed within it. Hell, I didn't even mention how Kyuji actually dies during the Team Black game, via Nashi Mu's Killer L-Shaped Pitch, & is replaced by a high school boy with a bum hand that was acting as the team's manager, who begs the gods to make him an Astro Superman to replace Kyuji... and is promptly struck by lightning, which powers him up & makes him the new Kyuji! Plus, I honestly wouldn't mind one day doing a proper review for this manga (god help me...), though to do that I'd like to own all of it physically, and currently all I'm missing is Volume 4 of Ohta Publishing's thick omnibuses. I have scans of Ohta's entire release, hence the images, but this is a manga that I couldn't possibly enjoy trying to read untranslated via a computer screen, mainly because this is actually a damn wordy manga at points; this demands to be experienced in a physical form. Still, I've wanted to give Team Astro its proper due & respect for a long time, and since I missed the 50th Anniversary of its 1972 debut I knew that I couldn't miss out of the 50th Anniversary of its 1976 finale. Yes, Team Astro is sheer & utter madness of a baseball manga, and (as Shiro Tozaki himself said) was a child of the 1970s, but there's more to it than the absolute lunacy that was drawn on its papers that makes it worth knowing about & respecting. It wound up essentially being the culmination of an entire era of baseball manga that came before it, one where "magic balls" were king, & it went to such a ridiculous extreme (as intended by Shigeo Nishimura, who proposed the initial concept of a "superhuman baseball manga" to Shiro Tozaki, as revealed in Team Astro Memorial) that it was clearly impossible for the concept of the makyu to go anywhere else afterwards. It had seemingly become an evolutionary dead end, hence why baseball manga became more focused on gag series & interpersonal character dramas after Team Astro ended. It truly was fitting that Kyushiro's last stand against his Astro brethren would see him repeatedly pitching what he called the Final Daimakyu... literally the "Final Great Magic Ball"; regardless of it was intentional on the part of Hiroki Goto & Norihiro Nakajima or not, that clearly says it all.
In reality, though, the makyu itself didn't die out... it simply changed sports. Masami Kurumada would take what Team Astro did, its ability to "attract" readers with its superhuman feats of skill & raw power (enforced by strong visual accentuation), & carried the idea of the makyu over to boxing with Ring ni Kakero, in turn helping create a brand new type of action manga that, over time, would leave the sports manga genre entirely & become its own genre. Ring ni Kakero would directly influence & inspire the likes of Kinnikuman & Captain Tsubasa, and when Fist of the North Star was in its initial planning stages Buronson, Tetsuo Hara, & editor Nobuhiko Horie saw what was appealing in RnK & Kinnikuman and figured out a way to make it work for their new manga... namely the idea of named special moves that stirred the imagination & kept readers engaged, which led to creation of moves like Hokuto Hundred Crack Fist (which itself was seemingly inspired by a move seen in Ring ni Kakero). Meanwhile, though Akira Toriyama was becoming a big star in Jump with Dr. Slump he was also a fan of Ring ni Kakero, & believed that Jun Kenzaki in particular was one of the coolest characters ever created, feeling that he, himself, couldn't possibly replicate what Kurumada had done. But when Dragon Ball started to move more into being a straight action series, instead of the more comedy-first series it began as, Toriyama knew where to look for inspiration when it came to drawing "cool" & engaging action scenes... and he eventually managed to create a Kenzaki of his own in Vegeta.
Yes, Dragon Ball is the action manga that would influence generations around the world for decades to come, and Ring ni Kakero is the "bible" that all modern shonen action manga follow the scripture of (even if unknowingly, at this point). However, Team Astro remains the very foundation that all them are built on top of, a foundation that itself was made of the makyu-heavy baseball manga before it that Shiro Tozaki, Norihiro Nakajima, & Hiroki Goto took to the absolute & utter limit... and then continued to take beyond said limit until seemingly nothing was left to build upon, because they all stayed true to a single motto, one that Shonen Jump itself seemingly continues to follow when it comes to how it serializes the stories of the manga housed within its pages: "One Game, Full Throttle".
Team Astro (Manga) © Shiro Tozaki/Norihiro Nakajima
Captain Tsubasa © Yoichi Takahashi
Team Astro (Live-Action) © 1972-2005 Shiro Tozaki・Norihiro Nakajima/Astro Kyudan Production Committee (TV Asahi, Bandai Visual, Toho, Interchannel, SKY Perfect TV Wellthink, Four Winds)
Astro Kyudan: Kessen! Victory Kyudan-hen © 1972 Shiro Tozaki・Norihiro Nakajima © 2005 Astro Kyudan Production Committee © Sunrise Interactive
Moero Astro Kyudan 2 © 1972 Shiro Tozaki・Norihiro Nakajima © 2007 Astro Kyudan Production Committee
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