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It can't be serious bones for serious pickings all the time—sometimes you can't get blood from a stone, and sometimes that Stone is me and
omigod what a stupid pun that's not even funny.
Point: Sometimes, no matter how bitter and jaded a comics reader can get, all lost in the morass of non-stop screaming movie trailers for terrible-looking Wolverine movies, something a-comes, and something a-breaks inside me, and something a-grows anew. That thing, dear reader, happened to me: to you, I say, it can happen as well. And the thing that did it?
Well that, dear friend, was
Slam Dunk.
Unless your only focus for comics news is these columns, which hopefully you've learned by now is
A) not their point and
B) means you're awesome, you've heard about this manga before.
Slam Dunk, from the estimable Takehiko Inoue, estimable because, well, he created
Slam Dunk: it sold over 100 million copies in Japan, and ended up making basketball popular enough that actual real live children, the kind with blood in their veins and muscles in their legs, went outside their rooms and started playing basketball. (Of course, recent stories in America have shown that freaks like to dress up in spandex and give food to homeless people, so a comic's quality can't be gauged by the behavior of its fan base. Thankfully,
Lost Girls never got that popular.)
Late last year, Viz started publishing an English translation of the manga, which originally ran in Japan from 1990 to 1996. At the time it was released, the interest I had in the comic had waned a bit—I'd had a chance to read one of Inoue's later basketball stories, the incredibly serious and tremendously tiresome
Real, which is all about what happens when jerks end up in wheelchairs. (If you haven't ever seen the documentary
Murderball, here's the spoiler: jerks who end up in wheelchairs continue to be jerks.)
But last month, when the second volume of
Slam Dunk was released, and I realized how cheap it was—only $7.99 for 200 pages—I figured that it wouldn't be a big loss to give it a shot, figured I should trust those smarter than I who had recommended it, and figured it might be interesting to read a comic that, you know, was REALLY popular, and not just by the lame standard hurdle that most American comics claim when they call themselves successful. That's not a slight to imply that something that can sell as much as
Slam Dunk is inherently of higher quality than comics that don't. Quality and popularity are, for my money, rarely things that run in tandem. That is to say though that there is an inherent value in looking into what's popular in a given medium, if only to get a sense of why something managed to attract such a mass of readers. (This is the same reason I read those stupid
Harry Potter books and watched those dumb
Lord of the Rings movies.)
You know how you read a review of something, and the reviewer says something along the lines of "It starts off simply…"? Yeah, that's not the case here. This starts off with a drawing of the main character screaming, tears pumping down his face like his eyes are one of those expensive waterfall faucets, where fresh clear liquid is released in sheets. This manga starts off, on the first page, with a guy screaming, and sheets of tears paint his face.
Take
that, everything.
The
Dunk does have a pretty simple plot, sure. It follows the antics of a kid named Hanamichi Sakuragi, a six foot tall kid starting off his first year in high school. He can't get girls, but even if he could get them, all he wants to do is walk them home from school—clean cut and kind, for a guy who fires between emotional highs like a pinball machine that has somehow managed to be even more frenetic and schizophrenic than, you know, a pinball machine.
No,
Slam Dunk isn't one of those [choke] "serious" type mangas, concerned with leading the comics fiend to the elitist heights of comics reader: this ain't serious comics, it's comics for boys—like, that's the actual product description—"shonen manga" pretty much means "
comics for boys." It's for kids, pretty much. It's about basketball, of course, and it's about girls, kind of, but mostly it's about being tall, sort of dumb, highly emotional, and extraordinarily good at beating the holy crap out of everyone while picking up rudimentary basketball skills.
Yeah, it's pretty awesome. Not in the pejorative, "let's all sit on the mountain top of maturity and look down at YA literature as something that's adorable but never truly great as art"—no, that's Neil Gaiman books and whatever that thing is about the
Pants That Can Travel To Different Girls From Broken Families. This is that other kind of stuff, the sort of stuff that's "for kids", but so well put together, so extravagantly simple and exciting that it ends up pretty much wowing anybody that comes along and gives it a chance. (Again: 100 Million!)
This is the good Pixar movies, it's that Bronze Age Disney—it's not grown up, make no mistake. What it is--and this might have a funny taste when you first give it a chance—is pure entertainment
as comic. The art, the dialog, the crazy sound effects, the extremes of emotional depiction—it all works like some kind of brilliantly structured tube, the kind that you can still find at some drive-thru banks, to grab the reader and fire them through its various twists and turns. It's not a comic that works to build towards one major climax, it builds to a hundred explosions, roughly breaking down to one every two pages.
It's all crazy, all the time, and while it's clear that the long-form stuff it's doing (like who will date whom, whether the team will make it to the finals) will play out in the later volumes, what really matters in the
Dunk is the here and the right now—like whether or not Haruko (the girl!) will forgive Hanamichi (our hero!) when she discovers he's not the reason that blood is coming off the face of (some jerk!) Rukawa.
(She does, almost immediately. But first she screams at Hanamichi so hard that a huge fireball of anger fires out of her, knocking him across the roof. Not because she has super-powers, but because this is the kind of manga where a person's emotional depiction is delivered not just in the volume with which they scream it, but also in crazed, unbelievable acts of classic manga weirdness.)
I'm not the first person this year to fall in love with
Slam Dunk, and I doubt I will be the last. But for the first time—probably not ever, but in long enough that I sort of feel a little sad to say it—I hope that some other people do as well.
Kids.
Tucker Stone's writing can be found in print from time to time. He currently blogs about comics at The Factual Opinion and Savage Critics.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2010
