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krpalmerWhen 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.
Reading this extra-thick opening volume, though, I had the feeling I could start to understand why the manga had been a very big deal. Maybe it helped that despite the early recognition of his talent Joe didn’t enter a boxing ring (but not a professional one, although Muhammad Ali’s knockout predictions did happen to get invoked) until the very end of the volume, whereupon things ended on a cliffhanger and an invitation to watch for the next one. The narrative that took him there caught me up and got me reading faster and faster; that story not being divided into the “chapters” that mark serialization could have had something to do with that by not offering obvious points to take a break at. I suppose I thought a bit of the first Spider-Man comics and comments I’ve seen over the years about Peter Parker’s miserable life attracting a somewhat older audience to think “sure, I’m not as bad off as he is, and yet I just might say my life has problems too...”
At the same time, though, some things about the manga might have appealed to me because I could still think of them as transitional. The artwork and character designs had a certain appealing simplicity I want to attach the word “cartoony” too even as I keep wondering about that being unspecific. A handful of rambunctious kids (which includes one little girl in big wooden sandals) managing to keep showing up even as their trying to see Joe becomes more difficult could have seemed like the story not altogether “skewing older” just yet. I did ponder the back-cover blurb including “perhaps the most prominent series ever to eschew any hint of the superhuman or supernatural,” but then was left wondering about cattle being punched out (if not by Joe) near the end of this volume. The question does remain how things might change going ahead, and how I’ll be able to take that. Having seen the anime is now streaming officially on Crunchyroll, I did check the episode thumbnails to suppose all this manga only corresponded to about thirteen episodes out of a hundred and twenty-six. I know I got through the manga a lot quicker than I’d have got through thirteen episodes of anime; the wrinkle is having to wait in between volumes.
Reading this extra-thick opening volume, though, I had the feeling I could start to understand why the manga had been a very big deal. Maybe it helped that despite the early recognition of his talent Joe didn’t enter a boxing ring (but not a professional one, although Muhammad Ali’s knockout predictions did happen to get invoked) until the very end of the volume, whereupon things ended on a cliffhanger and an invitation to watch for the next one. The narrative that took him there caught me up and got me reading faster and faster; that story not being divided into the “chapters” that mark serialization could have had something to do with that by not offering obvious points to take a break at. I suppose I thought a bit of the first Spider-Man comics and comments I’ve seen over the years about Peter Parker’s miserable life attracting a somewhat older audience to think “sure, I’m not as bad off as he is, and yet I just might say my life has problems too...”
At the same time, though, some things about the manga might have appealed to me because I could still think of them as transitional. The artwork and character designs had a certain appealing simplicity I want to attach the word “cartoony” too even as I keep wondering about that being unspecific. A handful of rambunctious kids (which includes one little girl in big wooden sandals) managing to keep showing up even as their trying to see Joe becomes more difficult could have seemed like the story not altogether “skewing older” just yet. I did ponder the back-cover blurb including “perhaps the most prominent series ever to eschew any hint of the superhuman or supernatural,” but then was left wondering about cattle being punched out (if not by Joe) near the end of this volume. The question does remain how things might change going ahead, and how I’ll be able to take that. Having seen the anime is now streaming officially on Crunchyroll, I did check the episode thumbnails to suppose all this manga only corresponded to about thirteen episodes out of a hundred and twenty-six. I know I got through the manga a lot quicker than I’d have got through thirteen episodes of anime; the wrinkle is having to wait in between volumes.