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March 09, 2005
Suzuki Nakaba: Blizzard Axel ch. 1
This week's Shonen Sunday features the first installment of Suzuki Nakaba's new series, Blizzard Axel. When I first saw the name 鈴木央 I thought I had seen it somewhere, but I couldn't quite place it ... until I began to look around for info on this new series and figured out that Suzuki used to draw for Jump. Not that I've ever read any of his comics; he's just rather infamous for a number of reasons, so I had seen his name around on various Jump fansites I visit.
His golf series Rising Impact was cancelled by Shonen Jump, and then became the first -- and so far only -- Jump manga to be resurrected from cancellation by means of reader protest. It only makes the story funnier that it was cancelled again shortly after. He went on to draw Ultra Red, and while I'm told Rising Impact was a very good golf manga, Ultra Red is, reportedly, a horrific martial arts manga ignoring human anatomy which you can only sneer at. At any rate when that was cancelled as well, he wrote the words "BYE BYE JUMP" in a mob scene of the final installment, and left Shonen Jump to never return. "Bye bye Jump" has since become slang for a manga writer breaking contract with Weekly Shonen Jump, which is how I know his name.
Anyway, onto Blizzard Axel. Program (as the chapters are titled) 1, Minna ore o miro! (Everyone look at me!!). Kitazato Fubuki is a delinquent who just entered middle school three months ago, and already he has won his 100th fisticuff. He has a pretty typical (of the mid-90s, anyway ...) delinquent-shonen-hero!background of being ignored by his parents growing up because his three older brothers are the smartest kids in Japan who excell at sports, music, writing, and everything else they touch, so what he wants most in life is attention -- hence the fighting. What sets him apart from many other delinquent heroes is that he's far from depressed or repressed, and seems to live life with simple-minded optimism and good humour. For instance, where Naruto has been brooding for the last 20 volumes of that manga while pretending to be chipper and over it, Fubuki doesn't dwell in self-pity but rather goes out on a hunt for something that he will actually excell at. I like him, and I don't like shonen manga heroes easily.
So after no one congratulated him on his 100th victory and no sports club would have him (or they had too small a crowd to please his craving for attention), Fubuki decides to go with a couple of his friends to a skating rink. There, he sees the members of the local figure skating club practising, and upon noticing that the other customers are looking at the figure skaters, he begins to meddle with them to get attention. One of the figure skaters, a tall guy called Gotanda, tries to divert the attention from Fubuki and does a double Salchow (Salchow being the second-easiest jump, a double Salchow being pretty much nothing by international senior standards). The other figure skaters are like "Hehe, that was nothing," but the regular visitors at the rink are of course amazed, and clap for Gotanda. Fubuki sees this and realizes that these jumps gain *gasp* attention! and attempts a jump as well. It's his first time ever trying, but with a horrible form of legs and arms flaring he still manages a two-and-a-half turn jump!
But because the form was terribly ugly, people just laugh. Gotanda (who is really annoyingly smug -- typical shonen manga rivan type, I dislike him already) then calls the attention back to himself and performs a triple Axel, and while his landing is bad (I can't tell from the drawing if he keeps it on one foot or not? Probably not), people still slap because dude, three and a half turns! Amazink! (Triple Axel really is a difficult jump. I just can't stop being sarcastic about Gotanda, because he's an idiot.)
Fubuki, however, is all "Buh?" and asks if that's a cool jump by figure skating standards. Hey, he could do that if he keeps his arms and legs tucked into his body. No one believes him (except the coach who already saw Fubuki's potential in the first jump -- hahaha, how much more typical can this sports manga get?), but Fubuki races to a jump ... and with an incredible hight and velocity, Fubuiki does a ... dum dum dum ... quadruple Axel! While screaming "EVERYONE LOOK AT MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!", of course. Heee heee.
Anyway, his landing sucks but there's major applauce, and the chapter ends with Fubuki narrating, "This was the first time everyone paid attention to me ... and this was my first meeting with figure skating." Awwww.
On the whole, I enjoyed this first chapter more than I thought I would. It does somewhat fall into the "figure is all about the jumps" pattern, but I had expected as much, so. Jumps are a huge part of it, true, but if this manga is going to continue and Fubuki is to enter actual competition, shonen manga unfriendly stuff like coreography and artistic expression has to come into it at some point. The glittery pretty color cover image makes me think Suzuki will be dealing with those things, though, so I'm going to sit back and see how he'll do it. The coach's words about how figure skating is a lonely sports makes me think Suzuki knows what he's talking about. (It's lonely! And unnatural! And therefore so beautiful! And so on.) Susuki-sensei, I trust your word when you write that you love figure skating. Don't let me down.
I like Suzuki's art. He tends to overuse purposefully deformed anatomy, but his characters have expression and life and especially Fubuki moves around lively on the pages, and it's all really cute. The art and especially the facial expressions are a big part of my liking Fubuki. Never mind that the Fubuki in the manga looks nothing like the the one on the color cover! Because really, he doesn't. Like, who's that shiny femmy bishonen, dude? Is he going to be introduced in the next chapter? I'm not going to comment on how authentic the skating moves look here, because I'm really no expert of that. To me, it looks okay. Not spectacular, but it gets the point across.
As mentioned above, as far as first episodes of sports manga goes, this is standard fare. A protagonist with hidden potential (so hidden he didn't even know about it himself) does something spectacular (even something no one in the world has done before) and is discovered by an expert. I was expecting the quadruple Axel the moment I saw the title. I hear some Chinese men have done it in practise, but I don't believe it's been ever done in competition, so it's a pretty obvious thing for a protagonist to be able to do (and not at the current moment considered impossible, like a five-turn jump). I can just see this series becoming an epic on the scale of Kyojin no hoshi, I really can. I wish it was a finished 40-volume epic I could pick up and spend one entire Saturday reading. Alas it's not, and I must try to contain my excitement. Augh! Come quick, next chapter.
A quick google search of the dialect used here suggests to me this is set in Tochigi (a prefecture slightly North-East of Tokyo). Might be wrong. I wonder if it has any significance, though.
Oh, by the way, better explanations of figure skating terms than I could ever give: FAQ at SkateWeb.
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