Manga Thoughts: Ashita no Joe: Fighting for Tomorrow 1

When I set about watching through “sample episodes” from six decades of anime two years ago, I had only one series starting in 1970 available with subtitles. Unlike a few other early cases of that, I was uncertain about sampling it. My post about Tomorrow’s Joe began by lamenting how, for all that I knew the original manga had been a very big deal, the accumulating injuries of boxing unsettle me. I do wonder, though, if I’d protested too much; I can at least understand how the “repelled” versus “compelling” balance has varied over time and for different people even if some of the results of being punched repeatedly start to hint at “body horror,” something in general I really don’t do well with at all. (For that matter, clothing getting ripped in “staged fights” doesn’t appeal to me either. By the time this leads to admitting that bits of an outfit being lost over the course of a story might not appeal as well, maybe I’ve given enough away to be psychoanalysed.) All of that does lead into how, when I learned the original manga was being translated and released over here, I wound up buying a copy even if a “three-in-one hardcover” was awfully expensive, especially given the paper didn’t seem that different from the stuff that yellows over time in ordinary manga.
( A bone-white ring under the red-hot sun )