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November 01, 2004
Konomi Takeshi: Tenisu no ojisama 1
First volume in the on-going series about Echizen Ryoma, a 13-year-old tennis prodigy who comes back to Japan from the US, enters the tennis team of Seishun Gakuen, becomes a regular member, and aims for all-Japan. It's a supokon (short for "supotsu konjo", roughly "sports guts") manga in the classic sense: lots of unique characters with their own ideas and goals fight each other in a tournament. Don't be put off by the fact that this is about sports; basically, it reads like an ordinary fighting manga.
If I had read the first installments of TeniPuri (as it is called among Japanese fans) in Weekly Shonen Jump (WJ), I'd have dismissed it as a misled attempt for WJ to get yet another sports-mixed-with-a-bit-of-gag manga in their stable of similar titles. The genre has succeeded in the past and probably will continue to prosper, but I wouldn't have thought that TeniPuri could survive in WJ.
The art is rough, not necessarily bad but definitely underdeveloped. The episodes are quite cliché, with an almost all-mighty protagonist beating annoying side-characters easily. The story is trying to be self-contained while also retaining the possibility for expantion, which is common in a WJ manga (because WJ cancels manga like US TV cancels TV drama), but doing it rather awkwardly. WJ was giving Konomi Takeshi the chance for a big break here, but I would have thought it was a bit too early for him and expected TeniPuri to be cancelled after six months.
How wrong I would have been.
TeniPuri is popular. Dead popular. In fact, more popular than technically and artistically better WJ titles like Hikaru no Go and Hunter x Hunter. The evidence? Maxi CDs with practically every single character of TeniPuri is being released as we speak. How much bigger can a manga/anime get? No, seriously. The last title I remember something like that happening for is Angelique, and that was a game specifically aimed at a female otaku audience.
Just so there are no misunderstandings, I don't mean to say TeniPuri is a bad manga. Volume one just isn't very well drawn or interesting. It has promise of becoming more than "just another sports manga", like hints of interesting characters and good comedy (definitely the two strong points of TeniPuri); it just hasn't gotten there yet. Like many other WJ manga, volume one isn't the place to start with TeniPuri. Watch a few anime episodes, read a couple of random installments in WJ, and if you like those, read the manga from the beginning. That's what I recommend, and it also seems to be the way many hard-core fans got into it.
Posted by Alicia at November 1, 2004 06:46 AM