Manga Thoughts: Cross Game
Dec. 19th, 2014 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerI do seem more likely to watch an anime series about sports than to take in an actual game; the thought that I have enough things going on that I don't have the time in a single day to watch an hours-long game (save for, I suppose, a once-in-four-years playoff or final) does seem to have something to do with that. Out of the sports anime I've managed to watch, a good number of them just happen to be about baseball. That the sport has long been significant in Japanese high schools seems the reason why there are plenty of those series to start with; as for my personal interest in that particular sport, I do wonder if the casual convictions floating around that since "kicking"-based sports are bigger in certain markets than they once were baseball is therefore to be condemned, dismissed, and consigned to the historical dustbin just provokes the peculiar sympathy that can hit me in other contexts.
In any case, it was about five years ago now that I watched a baseball anime called Cross Game through "fansubs." I enjoyed it at the time, but with the awareness other fans were already convinced "sports anime don't sell over here" (as much as they might regret that themselves), and that I had therefore "enjoyed it without providing compensation." When Viz announced they would be translating and releasing the manga the anime had been made from, that very much caught my attention, even if they did follow that up by streaming the anime (through a service that didn't reach my own country) and some of the general good mood evaporated at once in complaints that Viz, large enough that it didn't have to make even the struggling efforts at keeping up "fan good will" of the other anime-releasing companies over here, wouldn't bother to make it available for sale on disc. I tried to look at the half full side as I started buying the manga, but before I could get started reading something I didn't have all the volumes of yet the controversy over a few panels being cropped in another one of their manga releases provoked an unfortunately familiar negative reaction from me. Even though I continued buying Cross Game where I'd stopped buying other Viz releases, I wasn't reading it. Eventually, I had all of the series piled up. After that pile had sat around for quite a while, however, I finally found the time to get to it.
The story of Ko Kitamura and Aoba Tsukishima, at once pried apart and brought together by an old tragedy but both striving to get their high school to the national baseball tournament at Koshien Stadium, was still familiar. There, though, I am reminded of how when an anime doesn't closely adapt the manga it was made from it gets criticized but when it does there can be a shrugging "what's the point?" reaction. Even so, I was inclined to think Mitsuru Adachi's art was quite capable but didn't quite seem to provoke thoughts of it being much more "lively" or "personable" than how the anime had managed to recreate it. In any case, I also remembered comments seen that the manga seemed rather more willing to play with that familiar "fourth wall" than a lot of other series. It also seemed more "digestible" than certain other manga I've read, easier to take a chapter in and then pick it up again to read another and then another.
I did get to remembering one subplot from the anime where Aoba has the chance to join a women's baseball team through growing convinced it wasn't in the manga, and remembered how it had ended with some complaints from other people watching the anime that she was still being "denied the chance to get on a real field," something that did begin to weigh on her as the story progressed; however, there was a brief scene in the manga that could be taken as wrapping that unseen subplot up. In any case, I also got to remembering recording the feeling that Cross Game was refreshing for standing against generic complaints about "all anime being in some fashion grotesque these days"; I may, however, be better at just not letting that claim bother me these days. There is, though, the thought that Aoba's prickliness might let her be called a "tsundere," and when a female anime character gets named that it does sometimes seem intended to dismiss her. Still, she and the large supporting cast do seem a bit more interesting to me than Ko, who can seem a bit opaque, which I suppose does distinguish Cross Game from my impressions of the baseball anime Touch, two decades earlier but also based on a Mitsuru Adachi manga, which I'd managed to see before the later work. At twice the length as Cross Game, Touch did perhaps begin to feel as it it was "contriving" some situations in its later episodes as well.
The final game of the final playoff series played out at the pitch-by-pitch pace I've come to recognize in other baseball anime series (although perhaps not quite with the same "we know he swings at these pitches" calculation I've begun picking up in them; Ko just pitches hard and fast), but even so I was thinking the whole thing had gone by more quickly than the anime had... although that's a matter of watching something at an episode-a-week pace; if I'd gone back to the anime to watch at an episode-a-day pace, it might have taken about as much calendar time as it had to read the manga. On the other hand, watching anime seems to take more "clock" time than reading manga, so I didn't mind getting around at last to experiencing a familiar story in a different way.
In any case, it was about five years ago now that I watched a baseball anime called Cross Game through "fansubs." I enjoyed it at the time, but with the awareness other fans were already convinced "sports anime don't sell over here" (as much as they might regret that themselves), and that I had therefore "enjoyed it without providing compensation." When Viz announced they would be translating and releasing the manga the anime had been made from, that very much caught my attention, even if they did follow that up by streaming the anime (through a service that didn't reach my own country) and some of the general good mood evaporated at once in complaints that Viz, large enough that it didn't have to make even the struggling efforts at keeping up "fan good will" of the other anime-releasing companies over here, wouldn't bother to make it available for sale on disc. I tried to look at the half full side as I started buying the manga, but before I could get started reading something I didn't have all the volumes of yet the controversy over a few panels being cropped in another one of their manga releases provoked an unfortunately familiar negative reaction from me. Even though I continued buying Cross Game where I'd stopped buying other Viz releases, I wasn't reading it. Eventually, I had all of the series piled up. After that pile had sat around for quite a while, however, I finally found the time to get to it.
The story of Ko Kitamura and Aoba Tsukishima, at once pried apart and brought together by an old tragedy but both striving to get their high school to the national baseball tournament at Koshien Stadium, was still familiar. There, though, I am reminded of how when an anime doesn't closely adapt the manga it was made from it gets criticized but when it does there can be a shrugging "what's the point?" reaction. Even so, I was inclined to think Mitsuru Adachi's art was quite capable but didn't quite seem to provoke thoughts of it being much more "lively" or "personable" than how the anime had managed to recreate it. In any case, I also remembered comments seen that the manga seemed rather more willing to play with that familiar "fourth wall" than a lot of other series. It also seemed more "digestible" than certain other manga I've read, easier to take a chapter in and then pick it up again to read another and then another.
I did get to remembering one subplot from the anime where Aoba has the chance to join a women's baseball team through growing convinced it wasn't in the manga, and remembered how it had ended with some complaints from other people watching the anime that she was still being "denied the chance to get on a real field," something that did begin to weigh on her as the story progressed; however, there was a brief scene in the manga that could be taken as wrapping that unseen subplot up. In any case, I also got to remembering recording the feeling that Cross Game was refreshing for standing against generic complaints about "all anime being in some fashion grotesque these days"; I may, however, be better at just not letting that claim bother me these days. There is, though, the thought that Aoba's prickliness might let her be called a "tsundere," and when a female anime character gets named that it does sometimes seem intended to dismiss her. Still, she and the large supporting cast do seem a bit more interesting to me than Ko, who can seem a bit opaque, which I suppose does distinguish Cross Game from my impressions of the baseball anime Touch, two decades earlier but also based on a Mitsuru Adachi manga, which I'd managed to see before the later work. At twice the length as Cross Game, Touch did perhaps begin to feel as it it was "contriving" some situations in its later episodes as well.
The final game of the final playoff series played out at the pitch-by-pitch pace I've come to recognize in other baseball anime series (although perhaps not quite with the same "we know he swings at these pitches" calculation I've begun picking up in them; Ko just pitches hard and fast), but even so I was thinking the whole thing had gone by more quickly than the anime had... although that's a matter of watching something at an episode-a-week pace; if I'd gone back to the anime to watch at an episode-a-day pace, it might have taken about as much calendar time as it had to read the manga. On the other hand, watching anime seems to take more "clock" time than reading manga, so I didn't mind getting around at last to experiencing a familiar story in a different way.