Flonne + Tron Bonne

So a couple of years before Inoue Takehiko started releasing Slam Dunk, he wrote this 40-page short manga called "Piercing."  The two main characters are named Ryota and Ayako, but they don't seem to be quite the same people as in SD. They're more like proto-characters. 

I wouldn't say "Piercing" is all that interesting in itself, but it's cool to look back and see how far along Inoue has come along. I don't read his current manga Vagabond, but the art in that series is ridiculously detailed and precise, and I'm sure the story is well told.

Inoue is doing all sorts of mega-artsy things nowadays. Like the enormous washi paper making and the Antoni Gaudí exhibit and the whole ambassador to Spain thing...it's hard to believe this is the same guy who drew Akagi's butt in the first volume of Slam Dunk. 

Maybe I'm selling the younger Inoue kind of short though. Now that I think about it, the end of SD is quite sombre in a lot of ways, and the art by the end of the series gets pretty damn realistic. In an interview, Inoue states that he pretty much had the ending of the series already planned out from the beginning, which makes me think that the guy was always serious about giving his story some narrative heft even when he was showering us with monkey jokes. What a guy. 

Maybe I should actually read Vagabond one of these days. If only Inoue would hurry up and finish it. 

Did you know that Inoue Takihiko did a short sequel to Slam Dunk called 10 Days After? You can download the scanlated at http://summerdrummer.livejournal.com/6763.html. 

The neat thing about 10 Days After is that Inoue drew the whole thing on the blackboards of a school in Kanagawa over the course of 3 days. It was a big event, with 5000 visitors and a documentary and kids playing basketball in the gym with Inoue and everything. 

You can see footage of the event, including Inoue drawing on the blackboards, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfrDbxmP7h8

Inoue's message to his fans is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lmz-0lbfwIo (in Japanese, no translation).

Ahhhh, nothing makes me happier than SD. (Hikago might be my favourite series, but SD is my comfort series.) 

I've been having a lot of meta thoughts about sports anime lately, thanks to Haikyuu!! and Yuri!!! On Ice (what is it with exclamation points in anime titles nowadays). Also Chihayafuru, which feels like a really underappreciated series grumble grumble.

Anyway, today I want to talk about the idea of "Real Life" in sports anime and manga. Ha ha. I'm going to identify some series that are so focused on sports that they are almost escapist, and then sports series that have a lot of Life in them, and then I'm going to talk about how some sports series let you escape for a while and then inject a dose of Life in them through what I call "Life Intrusion Moments." And then I'm going to relate this to other genres, and to writing in general. 

Note: I haven't done enough research to write a real essay here, and I'm going to only cut out the worst spoilers, so yeah, this bit of meta will mainly be for me me me me me. Also, I've never seen some of the really important sports series out there (like most of Eyeshield 21, Hajime no Ippo, and pretty much all of the baseball and soccer ones, yikes), and I haven't seen any series with female stars, so this is going to necessarily be a limited analysis of whatever I feel like and know. Wah. 

Slam Dunk fans! You must watch this.

via http://thelockerroom.livejournal.com/58639.html:

NEWS FLASH! Gacked from ramble_corner and quixotic_sense:

Slam Dunk to be adapted into a live-action movie

Or maybe just a "tribute," not an adaption

WTF. Jay Chou as the lead (Sakuragi?). Possibly BoA as his girlfriend (Haruko?). WTF. WTF.

My vanilla yoghurt tells me that it contains "the active and unique BL(tm) culture." Hm.

Anyone who is anyone is kicking it oldskool at dancedance_fan (a com for reccing animanga titles & fandoms) where it is now officially Slam Dunk week! Today is canonland, so you can download the first volumes of the manga in today's postings. SD is pure shounen awesomeness, the sports series that defined sports series, and also one of the funniest damn things ever.

Speaking of kicking it oldskool, I've recently started reading some of the works of Tezuka Osamu, the "God of Manga" and "God of Anime" who wrote Astro Boy. His second volume in his Phoenix series, entitled Future, is absolutely magnificent. The scope of the story-telling is amazing--it goes from microcosmic to macrocosmic in the blink of an eye. The first half of the story seems fairly "normal," but the second half heads into superbly imaginative territory. I actually cried near the end of it, not because I felt pity for the characters (which I did), but because I was so flabbergasted by the plot and Tezuka's concerns about humanity's future. It's easy to make me cry for the characters, but to make me cry for the storytelling? That's something else.

Oh yeah, and fic of the day:

Title: The Silent Path (previously known as "Untitled")
Fandom: Hikaru no Go
Characters: Sai
Genre: AU
Spoilers: None
Summary: What if Sai had not been allowed to play Go?

Title: Basketball for Dummies
Fandom: Slam Dunk
Characters: Sakuragi, Rukawa, Miyagi, Mitsui, and (gasp!) an original character who actually doesn't do much.
Genre: General, mostly
Spoilers: For the end of the manga, which by the way goes on longer than the anime.
Summary: In which the torch of Shohoku is sort of maybe passed on to the next generation after much violence is done. The fifth and final story in my "Captains" series; previous parts can be found at my fanfiction.net account.

( Basketball IS for dummies )