About Mitsuru Adachi (or… “What I Could Find About Adachi on the Internet”):

Mitsuru Adachi has been a published manga artist since 1970. Over the past 40 years he has published many series primarily in the various Shonen Sunday magazines. He is most famous for his shonen baseball manga such as Touch, H2, and Cross Game, and most of his series involve sports in one way or another, including series about swimming and boxing. His works have been adapted into a number of anime series and live action series and movies. According to the brief biography in Viz’s edition of Cross Game his works have sold over 200 million copies and he is in the “top echelon” of manga creators. Take that for what you will, but it does appear that his career has been long and popular.

His appearances in English have been few. Viz published two volumes of short stories called Short Program in 2000 and 2004. Copies of this are kind of rare, and the cheapest one I could find on abe.com was $25 with the next cheapest being $40 (for the completist only, I guess). Cross Game is his first series to be released officially in English (oddly enough three of Adachi’s baseball manga–H2, Touch, and Cross Game–have been published in France, perhaps baseball wins for being exotic there?), though there are scanlations of a great number of his works online. I probably wouldn’t have picked up Cross Game if it weren’t for my reading of the scanlation of his baseball series H2.

From what I’ve read of his work, Adachi’s works share many qualities both visually and narratively. Besides sports they mostly feature teen male protagonists, often focus on siblings, and tend to combine the coming of age story with teen romance and light comedy. Adachi’s comedy often includes metafictional touches, like the appearance of Adachi himself, comments on the work process, and characters commenting on extradiegetic elements. In this respect in reminds me of some of Tezuka’s comedic turns. His character designs are surprisingly consistent, especially if you look at a few of the protagonists. For instance here are male and female leads from three of Adachi’s most recent series (images from Adachi Fan):

Cross Game:

Katsu:

Itsumo Misora:

See what I mean?

About Cross Game:

Cross Game ran from 2005-2010 in Weekly Shonen Sunday and has been collected in 17 volumes. Viz, wisely, is releasing the series in multi-volumes. Volume 1 contains three of the original volumes with subsequent volumes including 2 of the originals. So, Viz’s translation will last 8 volumes. Volume 3 was just released in April, comprising volumes 6 and 7 of the original. It was adapted into a 50 episode anime which you can view in English online for free from Viz. I haven’t watched the anime, so no comments on that, maybe someone else during the MMF will have something to say about it.

The series protagonist is Ko Kitamura, the son of sports equipment store owners. He grew up alongside the Tsukishima sisters. Wakaba is his own age (they were born on the same day), and Aoba (who is the second protagonist) who is a year younger. The Tsukishima family own a cafe and batting cage, where Ko spends a lot of time hitting.

It’s hard not to discuss this series without spoiling the first volume, so be forewarned, I’m spoiling the first volume…

Ko and Wakaba are very close fourth graders and volume 1 shows them interacting, buying birthday presents for each other, etc. It also introduces some of the other characters that end up forming Ko’s baseball teammates and friends. At the end of the volume, though, Wakaba drowns at swimming camp (saving a younger girl). Her death forms a pivotal moment in the story and affects much of the underlying motivations and emotions that follow for Ko, Aoba, and many of the other characters.

The second volume moves forward to Ko entering high school. More characters are introduced, and what seems to be the larger overarching plot of the series is revealed. The day before her death Wakaba revealed to Ko’s friend Akaichi, that her dream was to see Ko and Akaichi playing in the Koshien, which is the stadium where the annual high school baseball tournaments in Japan are played (i.e. it’s like the World Series but high school). And so, that’s what they start working towards.

Of course things are not that simple. There is an antagonistic coach, other players, romance, unexpected rivals, unexpected friends, and all kinds of plot that goes on. Aoba, Wakaba’s younger sister, becomes a major character. She is an extremely skilled pitcher and a figure of romantic interest, who seems destined to be matched up with Ko (because that’s how these things go). And of course, there are baseball games. Adachi is very skilled at showing baseball games in a way that is not too detailed, but also not too generic. He mixes the playing itself with the emotional drama playing out between various players, rivals, and spectators. In this way he can make a game last a whole volume without it feeling like one is watching a whole baseball game (which would be pretty tedious in comic form even for a baseball fan like I).

So that’s a quick introduction. More on the series tomorrow from me. And then we’ll have a few more posts during the week from other writers: Craig Fischer, Andrew White, and Joe McCulloch. I’ll also be rounding up all the participating posts at other blogs throughout the week. Stay tuned.

A shonen sports manga would seem like an unlikely manga choice for a guy (me) who makes non-narrative comics and is often writing about work that exists on the fringes of narrative or genre. But, alas, while baseball drew my interest at first, Mitsuru Adachi’s skill and artistry made me a fan.

Cross Game is a shonen sports manga. Viz rates their edition at “Teen” but, almost halfway through, I can’t see how this couldn’t be read by younger kids (or maybe I know nothing about children, which is likely). A light hearted coming of age story is not exactly my normal reading fair. In fact, I’m not sure when I last read any shonen manga let alone one that wasn’t a sci-fi story (as much of the very early manga translation were when I was reading manga more indiscriminately). So what it is about this series that attracts me?

I could be really off-base, given my lack of experience in the genre, but it seems to me that Adachi is very skilled at working the genre. These types of stories (teen coming of age, sports) have a certain familiar storyline, tropes that everyone with any experience reading/watching narratives will already know. You know the hero is going to reach his goal. It doesn’t take much to figure out the romantic through-line that will play out, oh so slowly, over the course of the series. Of course the girl that is so quick to disavow her interest in the hero will fall for him. The bully becomes a valued friend. The plucky team will win out against the more experienced team with less heart. The only characters on that team that we will ever learn anything about are the only ones that will stick around during the rest of the story.

Not all these things have happened, yet (7 out of 17 volumes in*), in Cross Game. Some have and some are just my generic expectations of what will happen. Maybe Adachi will throw me for a loop (ok, he definitely–no way, no how–won’t have the hero fail to reach his goal, I just can’t fathom that), but the majority of the time he won’t. And I don’t really care, there is something to be said for the fulfilling of expectations, for the following the well-trod path, at least occasionally, as long as the execution is skilled.

Adachi does, though, throw off a few expectations from the end of volume 1 to the beginning of volume 2. And you can’t talk about it without spoilers, so… SPOILERS, though honestly, I was ruined for the surprise ending before I had started even reading the series, so I think the plot points are out there already fairly widely and I don’t feel like it ruined my enjoyment. Volume 1 sets up Ko, our male protagonist, and Wakaba, our female protagonist (so we expect), as grade school kids with a generically expected future romance, childhood sweethearts. Of course they’ll have a high school romance, not, one expects, without some obstacles, but still… they’ll get together. She even expects they’ll get married some day (she puts “engagement ring” on a year-by-year list of suggested presents for her that she gives to him).

Then, she dies. Volume 1 ends just after her death by drowning. And volume two picks up with Ko entering high school. Wakaba’s younger sister Aoba becomes the real female protagonist and Wakaba becomes the sainted dead girl. The characters (particularly Ko and Aoba, but also Ko’s friend, and catcher, Akaichi) are seen thinking about her, visualizing her presence. And, as these things go, her last words that we know about (spoken to Akaichi before she goes off and dies), her dream of Ko and Akaichi playing in the Koshien baseball tournament, become Ko and Akaichi’s dream and the driving long term goal of the series.

This taking on of another’s dream is not limited to Ko and Akaichi, though. As the story unfolds we find this theme repeated in a different form in the character of Azuma, another baseball player. He too seems to be living to play out his brother’s failed ambitions to reach the Koshien, though in this case he is motivated by a more direct sense of guilt. I say, “more direct”, cause it is not clear how much a sense of guilt plays into the Ko/Akaichi/Wakaba dream. I’m curious to see how these plots play out. Will Adaichi treat them uncriticially (probably) or will the idea of following a dead fourth grader’s dream start to seem a little silly (doubtfully, though wouldn’t that be interesting). (I guess I could read the plot synopses out there, or watch the anime, but I’ll stick it out in serialization as long as Viz doesn’t cancel the series.) I also wonder how my expectations for the Ko/Aoba romance will play against their feelings about the dead Wakaba. There is space for some interesting drama there, though I’m not convinced Adachi will go too far with it.

Of course after that first volume surprise there isn’t much that doesn’t go as you expect it would… Aoba’s cousin gets mentioned (they see him in a photo), so you know the mystery character that appears a few chapters later is him. And how can you doubt he will prove to be 1) a baseball player (or at least somehow end up on the team) and 2) somehow interfere between Aoba and Ko (who haven’t, yet, admitted any feelings for each other).

So… wait… why am I reading this series? Adachi does what he does really well. He works the characters and the plot so you want to know what happens next, and he keeps throwing in enough new characters and plot twists (as any serial must) to keep things interesting. For me, it may partially be a case of my lack of experience with comics in most of the genres Cross Game falls in: sports manga, shonen manga, teen coming of age stories. I couldn’t read a lot of series like this, but one really well done one will do. Kind of like how Nana is pretty much the only shojo manga series on my shelves.

And even knowing how the story will go is not the sum total of the interest it holds. I’m a huge fan of Yasujiro Ozu’s films (on which more another day, perhaps). Even watching most of them the first time you have a sense of how the story will end (marriage or death in most cases), and the second time through you definitely know how it will end. Yet, that doesn’t stop me from watching them multiple times and from gaining enjoyment out of the films: the shots, the compositions, the colors (when there is color), the interplay of the characters. There is much more to appreciate than the narrative.

So I guess what I really love is Adachi’s style and pacing. The series goes on its way in a leisurely manner and Adachi’s images lack the frenetic ostentation of so much manga targeted at boys, perhaps it is just his origin in the 70′s, or the subtlety of some of his scenes. As a whole, I’m attracted to elements of the work, sections here and there, rather than what amounts from the whole.

Let’s look at a couple pages…

Cross Game v.1 p. 152-3

Cross Game v.1 p.154

Late in volume 1, Wakaba has gone off to swimming camp, and Ko is walking home at night. The newscaster mentions the weather (which comes up a lot in the series, mostly visually). The second page shows us a peaceful nature scene. It is now daytime, the reader is left out of the context. Where are we? How does this relate to any of the characters? It’s a nice day out somewhere. Then, the third page, focusing in on the water, fast moving, gaining some menace as the images use a closer viewpoint. End of chapter.

It is only in the next chapter that this scene takes on any significance. For in the next chapter, we learn of Wakaba’s drowning. The first time reading the series, you think nothing of this sequence, it’s just another transition, another page of setting (which Adachi does a lot, on which, more later). The second time around, though, you understand. That speaks something to Adachi’s work, that, despite it’s origin in a serialized magazine, he is expecting that readers will reread, that something will be gained from rereading. It also speaks a bit to the concept of death and memory. When a person dies, settings, objects, words, feelings, can take a new meaning when revisited. The passage of time changes our conception.

More so, than the generic dream of going to the Koshien, it is in the moments like this where Wakaba’s death forms the real heart of the series.

Similarly, in the first chapter of volume 2, the reader still not aware that 4-5 years have passed since volume 1, we find Ko waking for school.

Cross Game v.1 p.198

We’ve seen the two alarm clocks in volume 1. They were birthday presents from Wakaba. That panel in the lower right is silent and relatively uninflected, yet, knowing the origin of the alarm clocks we guess Ko’s thoughts are of Wakaba (and on a first read through, this could be only days after her death). A second time through, we know the time has passed, Ko is still thinking of her, and having passed through the story once we also can imagine Ko is looking at something else in the room. He keeps the birthday present list Wakaba gave him in volume 1 on his wall.

Cross Game v.1 p.212-13

Another three page sequence on the same theme. A half page of Adachi’s pillow shots, returns us to Ko walking. He sees a baseball hat floating in the water which returns us to the baseball hat Wakaba borrows from Ko before leaving for camp. A hat her father gives back to Ko at her funeral. This is fairly subtle, Adachi doesn’t need to tell us what Ko is thinking about, the images make it clear enough. He hear’s his name, and, turning the page…

Cross Game v.1 p.214

Ko sees Wakaba for a second, but then reality intrudes, it is just her little sister, now the same age Wakaba was at her death.

Moving on, I have to talk about the other main part of the series, baseball. Adachi clearly knows his baseball and if the internet is to be believed, he even owns a baseball team. But he doesn’t make his manga all about the baseball. He using the game narratively in subservience to the characters and their stories. The games he shows are about the individual characters he is focusing on, and the primary action he focuses on is the confrontation between pitcher and batter (with catcher thrown in as the third part of the equation) as well as the interactions between team members and coaches. His portrayal of the game as a battle between pitcher and batter works into the sense of battle/fighting predominant in so much shonen manga, but it also provides a dramatic hook that can be understood without extensive baseball knowledge. Even someone with the most rudimentary knowledge of baseball knows that the pitcher doesn’t want to allow the batter to hit the ball, and that the batter wants to hit the ball. Drama. Conflict. It’s no surprise then that the protagonists of Adachi’s baseball series are always pitchers and sluggers, with a catcher thrown in as a secondary character. You don’t really learn much about the fielders, you often don’t even know what position the slugger plays. He’s unimportant in the field, only when he’s at the plate.

So you can get something out of the baseball scenes without knowing too much, though Adachi does show his knowledge. For instance, in the big game in volume 4 we see Ko pitching against the varsity team from his own school (there’s this whole thing about the new varsity coach and… well it’s just plot…). Aoba (who we see in the bottom corner) had pitched to the varsity team at one of their practices, so she learned a lot of valuable intelligence on the hitters. Here we see Ko putting it to use.

Cross Game v.2 p.107

You have to put this scene together a bit. The batter swings. In panel two we can see he connects to the ball pretty far in front of himself. The ball bounces over the first baseman. Easy out. Aoba notes that the batter was great against fastballs. To those who know about baseball, it’s clear what happened here. The batter is strong against fastballs, he expects a fastball (Ko throws a lot of them, as do most pitchers). Ko throws a slower pitch and the batter, swinging sooner because he expects the ball to be moving faster, has his bat way “out in front” (as they say) and hits the pitch too early to make an effective hit. Now you don’t need to know all that to follow the story, but it does show that there is a lot going on.

Cross Game v.2 p.118

I like the first panel on this page, as we see Adachi switching to a more realistic figure drawing to show the stopped action, surely based on photographic reference.

Cross Game v.2 p.94-5

Here’s a nice two page spread from volume 4. First thing you notice is the way the panel layout really works to add a movement between both pages. It’s dynamic but also in accordance with the content itself, with the large triangle in the center providing the real thrust of the homerun from right to left. The right hand page quickly sets up the locations and oppositions: Pitcher in one direction, batter in the opposite direction (setting up their opposition), and observer (that’s Aoba in the middle panel watching the game and commenting on it for the reader) watching it all, but here pointed in the direction of the ball (thus stacking the movement of the page against Ko, the pitcher. Adachi uses the speedlines and freeze frame type actions to play up the movement with a bit of an optical illusion in the bottom panel where it looks like the ball is passing through the bat. The bat is just poking out of the panel borders adding a little punctuation to its movement.

Where the right page is all dynamic quick motion, the left page slows down the movement a bit, the calm after the storm as everyone watches the ball fly. The close-up on Aoba’s eyes in the right page acts in accordance with the reader’s viewing. The compositions of the panels on the left page provide a nice sequence of close/distant, distant/close. There’s the ball in the air, the focus of everyone, still nearby to the batter, the pitcher, the observers. Then, it’s far away, just a tiny circle in the sky. The transition simultaneously slows the action and emphasizes the speed of the balls movement. And then the spread finished off with the antagonist haughty coach in his dugout, grinning at what he thinks is his great success.

It’s a really great sequence that is easy to read right past without appreciating how well Adachi has put it together to emphasize a lot of important details and oppositions. And it is that type of work that really makes Adachi such fun to read.

*Henceforth, referencing volumes, I’m talking about the Japanese numbering (i.e. volume 1 means the first third of Viz’s first book) except my images which are referencing to specific pages in the Viz volumes.

from Cross Game chapter 14.

Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game isn’t my normal fair, but during my baseball comics series I really enjoyed his H2. When I saw Viz was serializing this other baseball manga at their Shonen Sunday site (print volumes soon), I started following it.

It’s pages like the above that really get me. Adachi uses a lot of these pages that are more about scenery, weather, and seasons than any particular narrative plot or scene setting. They are very much like the “pillow shots” used by Ozu in his films. There is an excess to them that is refreshing, not excess as in visual excess or thematic excess, but an excess of narrative concision. Adachi doesn’t need to include these pages (or sometimes just a few panels), but they add to the atmosphere in an intriguing way.

These panels from the February 14, 1967 strip have a certain manic energy to them that contrasts with Schulz’s usually calm images. Even images such as Charlie Brown getting knocked out of his clothes by another well hit baseball does not have the energy of these two panels: the flying sweat drops, Lucy’s wild hair, and Snoopy’s improbably frayed ears. It looks like something out of a contemporary art comic.

An unusual use of text by Schulz in this strip from March 22, 1967. The batting averages placed inside the little explosion of Jose’s swings act as an effective shorthand to show his hitting skill. Instead of reading a narration of Peppermint Patty telling us he’s great, or having a series of panels showing him hitting balls (Schulz’s baseball scenes are never that involved), we “see” his skill through an abstraction of numbers and statistics.

I never did follow up my series on baseball comics with a post on baseball in Peanuts. Thinking about it just now as I scanned this last image, it occurred to me how Schulz’s baseball is as two dimensional as his settings. In Peanuts baseball is primarily pitcher, catcher, and outfielder, with the batter off-panel for the most part (that panel above is a rare case I’ve seen of hitting being shown). The focus is on Charlie Brown (pitcher) with the most frequent other fielders being Schroeder (catcher) and Lucy (outfield, I imagine her in center field creating a straight line through Charlie from Schroeder to her). Snoopy (shortstop) is also a more central position (particular when compared with first or third).

H2 is the only baseball manga I could find scanlations of which weren’t stuck in an annoying online interface. Mangascreamer has done an admirable job in getting out 29 of the 34 total volumes of this series. I’m eagerly awaiting the last five, which says something for the quality of this manga.

H2′s protagonist is Hiro a teenage pitching prodigy who quit baseball when a doctor told him his elbow could be permanently damaged if he didn’t stop pitching. He decided to go to a high school that has no baseball team at all and when the story starts he is joining the soccer team. His best friend is Hideo a hitting prodigy who goes to a high school with a prestigious baseball team. Hiro’s other close friend is Hikari, with whom he grew up and who is dating Hideo (Hiro introduced them). She also has aspirations to be a sports journalist.

Hiro soon discovers his doctor was a fraud and that he can pitch. He joins up with a girl named Haruka (yes, all four main characters have similar “H” names, and yes it is confusing at times) who is manager of the school’s baseball club. With his catcher friend Noda (who was also misdiagnosed by the same doctor, coincidentally enough) they form the club into a real competing team. Over the course of the series many other characters are introduced and play differing parts in the tale, sometimes for a chapter or two, other times on an ongoing basis across many volumes.

The primary end goal of the series is for Hiro, star pitcher, to face Hideo, star hitter, in the Koshien, which is the high school baseball national tournament. Covering three years of time (at least I assume based on what I’ve read and what’s left to read), we follow the two friends and their team’s ups and downs.

Adachi does not only focus on the baseball. He also intertwines a classic love quadrangle amongst the four primary characters as well as numerous side stories for various teammates, opponents, and family members. While a single baseball game may take a whole volume (or more, volumes 13 and 14 are almost all just one baseball game), sub-plots are always intertwined between scenes of the game. Long stretches between major games will also focus on the interpersonal drama of the characters more than the sport. Adachi achieves a successful balance and integration of the two.

This is solid genre work. Adachi maintains interest and suspense throughout with small and large narrative arcs: individual games, the larger Koshien goals, smaller subplots in the drama/romance, and the larger question about the various character’s relationships. Once I started reading, I was hard pressed to stop; Adachi always leaves some question unanswered, some moment in suspense. Though in the end, there is not much left in one’s mind when the reading has stopped. A week or so after finishing the last scanlated volume, the story nor any real themes stick with me. This is not necessarily a bad thing, just to say, this is quality entertainment but not much more (narratively or thematically, at least).

H2 is a shonen (boys) manga so the characters are not very complex and the romantic subplots operate on a surface and clichéd level. Though it is to his credit that Adachi manages to create a complicated love quadrangle that does not rely on character’s acting with absurd levels of jealous. All four protagonists care for each other and act with a certain regard for the feelings of each other, including those who might be considered competitors for another’s attention. Adachi also scatters the work with mild fan service (in this case, gratuitous bathing suit or panty images) where not even a slight attempt is made to work into the story (except a very few cases where we see this adolescent sexual interest through the eyes of one of the boys).

I don’t read enough manga (particularly shonen manga) to say how much Adachi’s work is similar to other manga artists, but to my eye it is not stylistically unusual. While reading, I started noting pages that were interesting to me for one reason or another, and for such a long work, going through these examples is probably the easiest way for me to discuss the work.

One thing I noticed with his page layouts is a tendency to divide a page in half and then break those halves into small panel groupings. Often a half page is broken down into one quarter page panel next to two eighth-page panels, usually with the larger panel coming first followed by the two smaller panels. This layout is repeated so many times it becomes a convention of equivalence to the American use of a 6 panel grid, a kind of irregular regular layout.

(Remember to read all these pages right to left! Excuse the low quality, it comes from shrinking down the scanlation pages (which look great at original size). Click for a better look.)

Like in many manga, Adachi uses a lot of establishing panels that set the scene and backgrounds. Almost every chapter starts with at least one (if not two) page that is solely used to establish the scene. In many cases this allows for backgrounds to be dropped out of subsequent pages so the focus stays on the characters. The page above is a nice example of a briefer establishing page. It starts with a mysteriously abstract image that becomes a reflection on water under a bridge then we see Hiro running by.

Similarly, the above page is a a scene shift. Moving from the ballpark where Hiro’s game is going on (in the previous page) to a dorm where Hideo and his teammates are watching that same game (on the next page). I’m not sure what it is about panels showing clouds, but I always read them as a kind of time stoppage. As if the clouds force us outside of the relentless forward movement of time. Adachi uses this device often throughout the series and it almost always reads with that same sense of pause.

Another type of establishing sequence is this two page time shift that passes from one evening to the next morning. Again we see that reflection on the water as an almost abstract panel.

This half page is a good example of one of the baseball action scenes. The use of the speedlines and the progression fragmentation of the actors in the scene are typical. Moving from two characters to one to part of one (macro – mono – micro to borrow from Neil Cohn) forces the reader to provide the appropriate context. In this case it’s rather clear (the glove in the third panel being the first baseman’s as the runner is forced out), but at other times it is less so, particularly when dealing with characters that are secondary to the plot and hard to distinguish from one another (often the case with Adachi’s character designs).

This scene, at a tense moment in a long running game, shows Hiro (super pitcher and, of course, a great hitter too), hitting a home run off his rival pitcher (one of the few characters in the whole series that comes off almost completely negative). The whole world drops away at this moment. No announcers, no sound effects, even the crowd (in a visual metaphor) disappears on the third page (the subsequent page returns them to the stands cheering). Nice placement of the ball in the bottom of that third page, too, as it travels down and off the page.

Here is an slight but effective stylistic change. This pitcher (another rival) is being seen for the first time, and his amazing speed is visually heightened by the use of denser more frenetic speed lines in the background and more line work to render the character. A highly effective strategy.

This page is a strange one. Two panels are almost completely black except for a kind of abstract light. I’m just not sure what to make of it. Do the black panels represent some kind of subjective viewpoint (the sky past that sign we see in the middle panel?) or an abstract emotional representation? It does add a mystery to the page (I’m actually still a little confused about the birthday day subplot). Or perhaps, like the home run scene above, this is an image of the world falling away, the whole world except a small point of light that hovers on the margins, the enlightenment of Haruka’s solution to the mystery?

Another baseball example, where we see whirlwind sequence of strike-outs, which go by so fast it’s almost impossible to follow along. Adachi only rarely slows down to focus on pitch by pitch action. A lot of his baseball scenes focus more on the psychology of the players. This is very much character based action. He takes the time to introduce opposing teams, at least one player from each, and gives them some small subplot or background that adds to their mental state or performance during the game. Like other baseball comics the focus remains on big plays and big stars, but Adachi works to blend all this with the characters’ life off the field. Since he works so many games into the series, each one can have its own unique focus.

This sequence is notable for the slight confusion inherent in the scene, a confusion which not only adds suspense but an element of realism, as you might get this same confusion (did he catch the ball? didn’t he?) when watching a real baseball game. The layout and composition of the top three panels add to the effect. The ball in the first panel is placed right above the player’s glove in the second panel, which adds an impression that he will catch it. The third panel continues the player’s motion across the page and by taking us to the edge cuts off an immediate apprehension of where the ball went. Panel four shows the crowd roaring, but shorn of any text one is still in the dark. Only as one notices the small white circle in the field of gray that is the last panel do we realize the player missed the catch.

Overall, this should give some idea about the style of H2. It’s the best, most entertaining baseball comic I’ve found so far (which isn’t saying all that much I guess since I’ve only found a few), and the one that seems most interested in the game as a game. Of course, it does have the advantage of length, which none of my other baseball comics have. This is one of those manga that you think would make a great release in English. There’s gotta be crossover manga-baseball fans that would gobble this up. It’s quality material.

Previous Post in my baseball comics series: Satchel Paige by Sturm and Tommaso
Next Post in my baseball comics series: ???

Booklist: In Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow and The Golem’s Mighty Swing, you produced suspenseful and exciting baseball sequences. What would you tell a student of cartooning who wanted to create the same effect?

Sturm: Try to capture the feel and rhythm of the game and pay attention to its subtleties. Of course, it helps if you like baseball. But I would also recommend looking at Japanese baseball manga. American baseball comics have been pretty bad, always halting and truncated. The Japanese get it right; they let baseball unfold at a leisurely pace.

I may not get to my baseball manga review by next week, but I’ll probably have one of those halting and truncated American comics to review in the meantime.

This week’s baseball comic is another work from James Sturm, this time in conjunction with Rich Tommaso. I’m assuming Sturm is writing and making the breakdowns, while Rich is providing the drawings/compositions. Though neither are credited with any particularly duty, the drawing is clearly not Sturm’s, but the breakdown of the story into panels is reminiscent of his other works.

I’m never quite sure how to critique a children’s books. I’m not the intended audience, and I don’t have a lot of background with similar books (I read when I was a kid but not a ton of children’s books and not so as I remember them). This book is, like it’s predecessor in this series Houdini: The Handcuff King, written for children, and not as relevant, in my opinion, to the adult reader. Either way, I’ll do my best, though I can say, right off, that I’m not overly impressed.

I have to start by noting how deceptively titled and marketed this book is. To consider this a book about Satchel Paige is an over statement. To say that this book “follows Paige from his earliest days on the mound though the pinnacle of his career” and that the “author and artist share the story of a sports hero who defied the barriers of race to play the game on his own terms,” as the back of this books does is misrepresentation. This is not a biography of Satchel Paige, who is widely considered one of the best pitchers ever in baseball, nor is it a book about his defying of race barriers.

The bulk of the story belongs to and is narrated by a black man from the south name Emmet (a name which one only infers because his son is “Emmet Jr.”). In 1929 he heads off from Alabama and his life as a sharecropper to play in the Negro Leagues, with one of the all black baseball teams, and tries to earn enough money to support his family and buy a home that isn’t a shack. The main focus of the first part of the book is a baseball game that Emmet’s team plays against Satchel Paige’s team. Emmet manages to score a run off the young superstar but ends up permanently damaging his knee during his slide into home.

The second part of the book takes place over a number of years from 1930 through 1943, as we learn a bit more about Emmet’s life after his injury. He gives up baseball, doesn’t talk about it, and becomes a farmer, trying to support his wife and child in a place that is still controlled by wealthy white men. We see his struggles as the twin white sons of the old landowner exert their power over him and physically intimidate him and his son to keep Emmet, Jr. out of school and working in the fields. During this section we see, less a baseball game than a baseball exhibit, where the twin sons, on their way to join a minor league ball club, hit home runs. This section will provide some historical insight for the younger reader, who might (probably) be unfamiliar with certain aspects of post-slavery repression of blacks in the US: lynching, segregation, and general intimidation through wealth and power.

The third part of the book features a 1944 baseball game between Satchel Paige’s All-Stars and the local white all-stars in Emmet’s town. This scene is explicitly singled out as an example of a black man standing up to and beating a white man(men). Paige strikes out both white twins and one other white player. This example is a kind of a life lesson for the protagonist’s son (“Another first for Emmet, Jr.: Seein’ a black man sass a white” (69)), and rouses Emmet himself from a long silence to his son about his baseball days. They go home and Emmet shares stories with his son. Emmet’s narration references remembering “the type of man” he is, and hoping that his son will remember “who he can be” (85). This is accompanied by Emmet giving his son the baseball which Paige gifted him back in 1929 when he hurt himself. This provides an “uplifting” ending, but I don’t feel that this sense of “who you can be” is really earned. The issues that provide the focus in the second part of the book are not addressed nor do we see any indication how Paige’s striking out a few white men really changes anything for Emmet or his son beyond them bonding over baseball. It’s a simple and simplistic moral to the story, one which is probably suited for an audience of children, but feels hollow to me. In comparison, Sturm’s The Golem’s Mighty Swing’s thematics of identity and spectacle appear much more sophisticated.

One of the most interesting formal aspects of this book–which, somehow, I only noticed after a few readings–is that there is not a single word balloon in use. For some this would actually disqualify Satchel Paige’s identity as a comic, but for me it shows an example of an interesting narrative tactic. The main story is narrated by Emmet in the present tense, though the narration itself shows a certain retrospective view on the events (not unlike the narration in The Golem’s Mighty Swing). Emmet reports all speech and provides commentary on actions. One unusual use of the reported speech comes late in the story where one of the white twins yells a racial slur at Paige during his at-bat. The narration of the man’s words are written in extra large letters, but still maintain their place at the top of the panel where one finds the narration throughout the book. The narration often doubles the images, as if either Sturm or Tommaso were not sure of the images’ ability to tell enough of the story (or maybe it’s a tactic to make the reading easier for a younger reader). Almost every panel contains narration, only the occasional action panel is left silent. The textual narration carries the greatest weight of the story, and it would be nice to see a little more reliance on the images. For the most part the visual narration is as much Emmet’s as the text. I don’t think we need to have his story completely scrolled out as text.

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This sequence showing Paige striking out one of the twins, provides a good example that doesn’t need so much narration. The pitcher set-up and then the three repeated panels of a missed swing say just about all that needs to be said and is a great way to not only show the strike out but also show the speed with which it is accomplished: bang bang bang, you’re out. The umpire seen in panels 2 and 4 helps communicate the information and let us know that the image is not just a static sequence.

Two pages stand outside Emmet’s narration. Both show a montage of images in black and gray (as opposed to the rest of the art’s black and light olive) with typeset text that provide some extra narration about Paige’s activities. These two pages are the entirety of what might be considered biographical information on Paige. Otherwise he appears more as a mythical figure pitching in the two baseball games that bookend the story. These two pages are an odd fit for the rest of the book. They are clearly not coming from Emmet and mostly serve to give some credence to the idea that this book is about Paige.

Reading this volume back-to-back with Sturm’s solo baseball book, it’s hard not to make comparisons with not just the story but the art. Tomasso’s drawing is stiff and awkward in comparison with Sturm’s. The figures seem ill-suited to the action of the baseball games. His style is simpler and more abstracted than Sturm’s, though it has a certain charm that just feels poorly fit to this historical tale. This isn’t to say it’s all bad, there are some well-composed images, interesting figures, and use of lines and sound effects to convey the action of the game. The sequence below shows some of these conflicting aspects. The first panel is a well-done action panel with a dynamic sound effect, but the second and third are more problematic. The fielder in the second panel looks terribly awkward and the composition of the image focuses completely on that figure (he’s so centered). The third panel is just a bit confusing narratively, as the figure (I assume that is Emmet) seems to be running at top speed. Based on the background, he is running back to the plate from first. If the ball were called foul, why is he running like that with some much effort?

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The baseball scenes themselves are not particularly exciting or different than what is seen in Golem. With the subject of Paige, there is a natural focus on the pitcher/batter conflict, which was missing in Cotton Woods. The panel pacing is well done, particularly in scenes where Paige himself uses time as a tool against the batters. We see Paige tying his shoe, walking around, joking with his fielders. In his at-bat, early in the book, against Paige, we similarly see Emmet try to take back some of the pacing of the game (see the sequence below). This is one of those moments you see a lot in a baseball game: the little batter’s rituals that are performed in endless variations. These panels also show a bit of the redundancy of the textual narration.

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All in all, not a great comic nor a great baseball comic. I can’t speak for its effectiveness as a children’s book, though I wonder who this would appeal too. I’m not sure we get enough of a sense of Paige’s greatness to make him the mythic figure he needs to be for this book to really work for a younger audience.

Next week, I’m hoping to have a review of the baseball manga H2 by Mitsuru Adachi. Or at least a review of some part of it as the scanlation hasn’t quite reached all 34 volumes, and I don’t think I’ll even get the 28 that are scanlated read.

Previous Post in my baseball comics series: The Golem’s Mighty Swing by James Sturm
Next Post in my baseball comics series: H2

Baseball month continues with this comic by James Sturm, the first of two baseball comics by Sturm I’ll be reviewing. Outside of his work with the Center for Cartoon Studies, Sturm is best known for historical fiction comics, included the recent collection James Sturm’s America (which includes this story). Even his Fantastic Four book Unstable Molecules is firmly situated in a historical context.

(While he shows a debt to Gotto, Sturm takes his own path, in this action panel, the sound effect is beautifully integrated with the ball. Significantly more effective than Gotto’s starbust images.)

The Golem’s Mighty Swing takes place sometime during the Prohibition era (1920-1933) in the American midwest. The main narrator is Noah Straus, the “Zion Lion”, a former major league ballplayer, who leads a barnstorming Jewish baseball team called the Stars of David. The team travels from town to town in a beat up bus, playing local ball clubs and taking abuse from the towns’ folks.

The story is divided into three parts. The first has the team playing a game in Michigan. They stick around town afterwards and a man name Paige approaches Noah about a moneymaking scheme where one of the players would dress up as the mythical golem during games. Noah is against the idea, but later, when the team’s bus breaks down, changes his mind. The second part covers the game and surrounding events when the team uses the golem idea. The golem seems to only heighten the crowd’s anti-semiticism and the game ends in a riot. The team only gets away thanks to a rain storm that washes out the game and disassembles the crowd. The third, and shortest part, is a bit of an epilogue, ten years later, where Noah goes to see another one of Paige’s schemes, a staged game where so-called big leaguers play again a bunch of men dressed as “hay seeds”.

A continuing theme in the book is the idea of spectacle and illusion. The Stars of David are all bearded jews, yet Hershl Bloom is actually Henry Bell, an african-american, and Mo Strauss (Noah’s younger brother) has a beard of shoe polish. The Golem is Henry Bloom in costume. Henry tells a story about a native american who played as an black man on a black ball club. The Stars of David offer themselves as a spectacle, which the crowds love to hate. In one scene a man calls into the bleachers at a women he knows. She doesn’t like baseball, but she’s there to “see the jews.”

The anti-semeticism of the crowds, in this context, seems to be as much about spectacle as any real hatred. A group of children throw stones at Mo and want to knock off his hat to see the horns underneath. They fall for the stories of jews as monsters. Paige plays up this idea with his Golem scheme. If the crowd thinks the jews are monsters, then he creates an even larger monster for them to see.

In the end so much of these spectacles come down to money. The Stars of David are trying to make a living, and Paige wants to make money off of them. The riot at the game with the Golem is even partly mitigated by the intervention of Mr. Putnam, the wealthy factory owner who set up the game. He wants to get his money worth from the game so he sends in the police to keep the crowd away from the team.

The story is mostly narrated by Noah. His words set the scene, act as a kind of announcer for the games, and allows for an easy compression of events which Sturm doesn’t feel the need to illustrate. Most of the story is also focused through Noah’s presence, but there are a few places where the focus travels to other characters and Noah’s narration drops out. At one point we follow Mo Strauss as he walks around town. People look at him suspiciously (though, in their defense, he stands in front of a farm house and watches a woman breast feeding), children chase him and throw rocks, and he ends up chasing one of the kids. The kid runs into a grocer’s sidewalk produce and knocks apples everywhere. Mo ends up talking baseball with the grocer and some other people. This is one of the only positive scenes of interaction we see between the Stars of David and other people. A small respite. In contrast, Noah’s narration drops out as Lev, one of the pitchers, heads into a town to a speakeasy for a drink and gets beat up. A third scene shows a newsboy hawking newspapers, while another, slightly crazy fellow runs around causing trouble and shouting about the golem. The townsfolk seem to look at this guy as a bit of a nut, yet, later, when the riot at the game occurs, he is there amongst the people and not all that different than the rest. They fall to his level as they fall for the spectacle.

This lack of narrative consistency went unnoticed my first time through the book. Once I noticed it, it threw the narration into question. Noah’s narration reads like he was telling a story to someone as if it were the present (i.e. “A fair had arrived yesterday,”). The more I think about it, the more odd and unstructured it is. Sturm complicates matters by occasionally using the narrative caption boxes for dialogue occurring in the story rather than Noah’s narration (which seems to exist outside the story). I don’t think it harms the story, but I wonder if there is something purposeful in it or if Sturm just didn’t consider it that fully. Noah’s narration exists mostly on a surface level, it doesn’t go into his feelings or psychology and I wonder how necessary it is for the first person element to be there at all. In general, I’d have liked to see a little more about the characters. Mo Strauss plays a fairly prominent role in a number of scenes, but the reader never gets a good idea at the whys of his actions, his anger. One even wonders why he plays baseball: for the love of the game? just to make money? to impress his brother? The use of the character hits at these questions, but does not explicitly raise or answer them.

(Sturm plays up the competition between pitcher and batter and the location of pitches.)

Enough about the narration, on to the baseball. In the acknowledgments section Sturm thanks, among others, Ray Gotto. Reading The Golem’s Mighty Swing so soon after Cotton Woods, I did notice Gotto’s influence in a number of the baseball scenes. A few of Gotto’s visual tropes make their appearance–the large foreground baseballs, expressive silhouettes, and the scoreboard as a narrative method–but Sturm shows the game in a much different way. In a 100 page comic book format, Sturm has a lot more space to work with than Gotto’s four panel dailies. We see the result of this in the way parts of the game slowly unfold. An early at-bat by Mo lasts more than 3 pages (25 plus panels). The tension between pitcher and batter is played up more than in Gotto’s work, as is more particulars of pitch number, location, and type.

The atmosphere of a baseball game is built-up through images of the park, crowd, and dug-out, with managers flashing signs. The panels are not focused solely on a star or a primary action; a roving eye, as seen in many manga, provides a greater sense of environment than seen in Gotto. For instance, this evocation of a home run in 6 panels (the panel at the end of preceding page shows Henry, the batter, connect with the ball) really makes the reader see the height of the ball along with the players and crowd. Notice how the ball appears at the same place in the composition for both panel three and panel four, only changing in size. Also note the Peanuts-like composition and style in the sixth panel.

(Click for larger.)

Sturm’s style has a certain minimalism to it. Less realistically rendered than Gotto or someone like Jason Lutes (another comic artist whose primary genre is historical fiction), but less iconically cartoony that Seth or Chester Brown. His work bears a relation to Jaime Hernandez in its (lack of) detail and geometric forms but with a rougher, less clean line. He frequently leaves out backgrounds, bringing them in when appropriate for the action. Note in the strip below how the focus starts on the batter, then the background (catcher, umpire, crowd) is brought in for the second panel to provide context, and the third panel drops out the crowd to focus on the pitch call.

(Click for larger.)

Sturm’s depiction of the game is quite excellent and he avoids the necessity for intense non-stop great plays and unrealistic achievements by using the game as a vehicle for themes beyond the game itself. If I find the themes a little under-developed, the baseball is rich, well-paced, and visually exciting.

We’ll end on this lovely strip. The ball rises in the first two panels and then is just slightly dropping in the third, so simple, yet so evocative.

(Click for larger.)

Addenda:

1) French bande-dessinée site, du9 has an interview with Sturm from while he was working on this book that has some relevant passages:

[Sturm:] Basically, the book is about identity. In all these stories I’ve been telling, I’ve been struggling with the idea of America … a country that has very quickly manufactured an identity for itself, myths for itself … and with the Jews there’s this tradition that extends before the concept of America existed. I’m thinking about the construction of identity of American Jews, and in the story I’m curious about how the media amplifies stereotypes.

What I also want to do with this book is just make a really good baseball comic. I like sports, and it’s been challenging trying to orchestrate the rhythms of a baseball game in comic form. The Japanese do it well.

Eli Bishop: Well, two things you really have not seen a whole lot of in American comics are sports and history. I really can’t think of any examples of sports comics.

JS: There’s Cottonwoods [sic], which was a comic strip from the 1950s by Ray Gotto; it was reprinted in a collection by Kitchen Sink. It’s really beautifully drawn, but a little stiff and hampered by its daily format. Lots of forced dialogue: “Hey, Cotton’s going to steal home!”

Some of the technical challenge of this book is not to have this phony voice-over — which does deliver a lot of useful information to the viewer. So I’m trying to figure that out … I don’t want every at-bat to last ten pages. I’m planning on using a voice-over narrative.

2) An excellent review of the book by Charles Hatfield in Indy Magazine.

Previous Post in my baseball comics series: Cotton Woods by Ray Gotto
Next Post in my baseball comics series: Satchel Paige

Baseball month starts with this classic comic strip from the 1950′s, Cotton Woods, in an out of print collection from Kitchen Sink which covers a selection of the strips from it’s start in the summer of 1955 through the last strip in July of 1958. While the strip is primarily a baseball strip, the protagonist played other sports (football and basketball, maybe others) during the off-seasons. The editors of this volume have left out all the non-baseball strips, which account for about 5 months out of each year.

(Cotton Woods, shortstop, narrowly dodges an attempt to spike him. A great example of Gotto’s dynamic baseball action scenes (and check out that cloud of dust). Take note of the crowd, too.)

The strip follows the life of Cotton Woods, a young man from the “mountain village” of Lonesome Gap, NC. Early on, he enters the minor leagues and quickly becomes the regular shortstop for the fictional major league team The Ducks. Back at home he has a mom, a younger brother (who often is injured or ill), and a missing father, who has disappeared before the story starts. At one point, the father turns up as an amnesiac trying out for Ducks, but quickly disappears. Later, he is in Mexico running away from some men, and the sub-plot remains unfinished. Cotton’s home town girlfriend is called Candie (and yes, there are a few meetings where a panel’s sole dialogue is: “Cotton!” “Candie!”) who is always waiting for Cotton to have enough money so they can marry. Cotton is aided by the village’s Sheriff who not only continues to search for the missing father but is also a former baseball player who just happens to be a friend of the Ducks’ manager. On the team, Cotton’s roommate and friend is Cyclone Clooney, a big country bumpkin who’s always chewing on a piece of long grass.

The plot tends to focus on the sports: games, the pennant race, injuries, rivalries, records, spring training, etc. It occasionally strays to subplots such as Cotton and Candie’s romance (including a few clichéd missed connections and misunderstandings), Cotton’s missing father or little brother being in trouble again, as well as Cyclone’s misadventures (mistakenly arrested for gambling, an unbelievably dumb wife). There’s nothing here that is particularly novel or inventive, everything falls into expected categories for a sports drama. Gotto does not stray far from conventions of plot or characterization. Cotton doesn’t always come out on top, but he does most of the time. The Ducks don’t always win, but they have a lot of miraculous turns of event. Cotton’s team never wins the world series and his marriage to Candie is constantly deferred to another day. But most of the time, whatever is needed comes just in the nick of time (money, a hit, a replacement player).

On my second read through this volume it occurred to me how much Cotton Woods is like a superhero comic. Instead of fighting crime with amazing powers, Cotton plays ball with extraordinary skill. No one steals home as often, gets as many home runs, hits as well, or fields as successfully as he does to beat the enemy/other team. His sidekick Cyclone is not quite as amazing, but he’s close, lacking only the same intelligence as his partner. He’s got a regular, small cast of supporting characters, a few revolving opponents, and he even has a uniform. It’s probably a stretch, but it reads in that same black and white, simple answers style of older superhero comics. But, I don’t (always) expect great literary quality from my comics. Other pleasures can be found in these strips.

(This early strip (click on it to see it in a larger size), showcases a number of Gotto’s tropes: silhouettes, longshots of the field, extremely foregrounded baseballs, clouds that seem to lay on the ground rather than in the sky, and that ever present burst that symbolizes the impact of bat and ball.)

Gotto’s artwork exists somewhere between the “bigfoot” style and the photorealist style, but closer to the photorealist (we might just call it realist). His work is more realistically proportioned and rendered than the former and more expressive and less detailed than the latter. He wavers between the two at times, to the strip’s detriment. Cyclone Clooney is too often drawn goofy and exaggerated, while many of the action scenes have the stiffness of the photorealistic style without the lush rendering (I imagine there were photo references involved). Gotto has a number of visual tropes he tends to repeat over and over again, like silhouetted characters (often extremely animated and expressive), a really large baseball in the foreground (with a player behind it about to hit, catch, or throw it), clouds (of both the sky/rain and the dust/dirt types) that seem to rise up from the ground, a background of radiating lines (like a sunburst almost), and the pointed star-like shape that represents some kind of hit action. Besides these stylistic representations, there are a great many occurrences where whole panels are reused, usually with just the text edited (I counted one panel repeated at least four times, many others two or three, and that’s just from paging through looking for images to scan).

(These two panels not only showcase the oft-repeated burst of impact, radiating (speed?) lines, and traced path of the ball but also a wonderful visual panel transition.)

The depiction of the game is very much focused through Cotton and limited by the space of the comic strip. There is little sense of the overall game, just the occasional score, inning, and chance for clutch hit or a glaring error. Even when Gotto decides to bring a pitcher in as an opponent with a name (for the most part, the players on both sides of the games are nameless and faceless), he captures little of the tension between pitcher and batter, which is one of the biggest parts of the game. Admittedly, I’m sure this has as much to do with space as any predilection of Gotto’s. You could spend the four panels of a day’s strip building up tension between pitcher and hitter, but it probably wouldn’t be very exciting in the serialized format. Because of these limitations, Gotto’s has to hit high points every day, every 2-4 panels, and that makes for a skewed representation of the game. Big hits, stolen bases, dynamic catches, these are not only, ostensibly, the most exciting parts, they are also the most visually dynamic parts of the game. Gotto is skilled at showing those dynamic aspects of the game, composing images for clarity and visual impact.

(The crowd as chorus, and what a crowd! The amount of detail in there is crazy. The women on the billboard is a plot point, fwiw.)

Gotto uses a few narrative tactics to move the games along in a speedy manner, so he can focus on the highlights (in some sense, the games in Cotton Woods are like the Baseball Tonight version of games). He frequently makes use of a kind of Greek chorus of spectators or announcers (it’s hard to tell sometimes) to let the reader in on events. This is often a chance for Gotto’s to showcase his skill with backgrounds.

(These wonderful geometric buildings act as a backdrop for a between games commentary by the fans.)

Sometimes he uses a montage image where a few small panels are crowded into the space of one normal sized panel. The example below is a nicely composed combination of three actions in one.

Other similar devices include the newspaper headline montage and the large scoreboard panel. His use of silhouetted figures squeezes a lot of characters/information into a small panel. They make for an extremely pared down visual image but are skillfully done to not only let the reader identify characters (when necessary) but also show posture and expression.

(Great silhouettes. In contrast note the detailed wood grain.)

The two panels above–the end of one day’s strip and the beginning of the next day’s–provide an example of Gotto’s in-game narrative tension. The first panel is also a beautiful and simple composition, while the second is a great example of visual depth. Gotto, as these many panels attest, is very skilled at filling his panels. Through compositional tools like the layered panel above (fore, mid, and background) he creates a certain density to his panels that adds to the realism of the images.

Cotton Woods seems to be little known. In his introduction to this collection Max Allan Collins notes its omission or slighting by a number of reference works on comic strips, while, right now, I note the lack of hits in on a quick Google search (mostly stores selling this book and news items on Gotto’s death in 2003).

While I found Cotton Woods to be narratively average, Gotto’s art and use of the form is skilled and worth examining. His compositions in particular are often brilliant, and at his best times, the baseball scenes are visually exciting. His representation of the game itself is limited in many ways, focusing so much on the “highlights” that little else gets through, but one can forgive him this because of the daily strip format.

I’ll leave off with one more dynamic image.

[Edit: I forgot to mention my thanks to Abhay Khosla for pointing me in the direction of Gotto's work.]

Next post in the baseball series: The Golem’s Mighty Swing by James Sturm

I’m going to search around for some of the paintings mentioned on that introduction, so far: a page here.

Posts in the series:

1) Cotton Woods by Ray Gotto
2) The Golem’s Mighty Swing by James Sturm
3) Satchel Paige: Striking out Jim Crow by James Sturm and Rich Tommaso
4) H2 by Mitsuru Adachi
5) ???