I’m writing this post to advise against purchasing Takao Saito’s Survival: Another Story from JManga.

Survival: Another Story is a one-shot sidestory to Takao Saito’s Survival, a 1978 shonen manga totaling twenty volumes, about a boy’s lonely struggles in an earthquake-ravaged Japan. The original story isn’t available in English at all, neither in print nor on JManga’s website. I can only imagine someone at JManga chose to translate this because it runs for a single volume, without any mindfulness of how it relates to Saito’s overarching series.

Another Story follows Satoru, a young man who passes out in the wilderness and is astonished to find himself in a city that has survived Japan’s massive earthquake. Though at first overjoyed at his return to civilization, Satoru quickly finds out the city isn’t the idyllic new home it seems.

While I’m unaware of Another Story‘s precise relation to the original, it doesn’t leave a strong impression on its own. The thought of seeing Takao Saito tackle a post-apocalyptic milieu is what originally bit my fancy, but I felt duped once I realized this was a disposable footnote that largely sidesteps that environment. I recommend JManga add supplementary information about their catalog, especially for more obscure selections such as this.

While Devil King is an interesting diversion from the action-minded gekiga you’d expect from Takao Saito, Dingo is a return to familiar territory, though it does enough to distinguish itself from that mostly humorless comic about Japan’s greatest assassin, Golgo 13.

Dingo is a seinen manga from 1978 about a Japanese private detective of the same name who plays as a tourist guide in Paris. Dingo is self-interested and mostly boorish, living with his French wife with whom he shares an open relationship. One of the manga’s recurring gags is Dingo coming home while his wife is making love with some other man. The man, noticing Dingo and his imposing frame, usually freaks out and runs away as the couple calmly tries to explain everything is okay. Boy, those French sure are wacky!

The organized chaos of a street brawl, Takao Saito style.

Volume one of Dingo is organized into five mostly standalone chapters. When Dingo isn’t comically interrupting his wife’s lovemaking, he’s getting involved in Paris’ criminal underbelly, primarily for his own profit. The stories span murder conspiracies, secret disguises, gambling, femme fatales, and everything else that belongs in a proper comic about a private detective. As you’d expect, Dingo maintains a strained relationship with local law enforcement, and one of the stories points to an even more morally ambiguous past where Dingo struggled with drug addiction at the behest of a former mentor, one of Paris’ crime lords. That story in particular points to the possibility of a broader narrative that I hope gets teased out in subsequent volumes.

Source: Amazon.co.jp

Takao Saito’s official website lists Dingo as having 48 chapters, but the manga seems to be very much out of print. Even digital manga bookstore ebookjapan only has the first two volumes listed. So once again, JManga is offering something relatively hard to find, though the fact it’s been more than a year with only the first volume released may frustrate those who enjoy Dingo and want to read more.

I get squirrelly whenever the word “novel” gets brought up in relation to an anime or manga, because anime based on visual and light novels is often the crappiest crap to ever crap.

Nevertheless here I am talking about Garouden, a seinen MMA manga drawn by Keisuke Itagaki and based on a series of martial arts novels by award-winning author Baku Yumemakura. I know next to nothing about the novels themselves, but I can say the manga straddles a middle ground in terms of realism: it’s more realistic than a series like Tough, which is a lot about non-existent martial arts techniques that can rip people apart, but Garouden still features characters capable of impossible over-the-top feats of strength, such as the ability to cleanly slice off the top of a wine bottle with a single finger.

The great things about Keisuke Itagaki’s drawing style all serve to enhance the series: his ability to depict a variety of interesting faces and body types, stylish attention to detail when it comes to clothing, and his completely unique way of drawing human anatomy, which will either be an acquired taste or an instant revelatory delight to the average reader.

In a lot of ways me writing about Garouden is a warmup to the inevitable writeup on Keisuke Itagaki’s magnum opus: Grappler Baki. Garouden is something of a side project, published erratically when Itagaki has the time to work on it. Grappler Baki, however, is the de facto MMA manga gorilla in the room, a reigning titan that is both revered and utterly mocked. And my affection for it is so disproportionately high it’s going to take a lot of effort on my part to not simply post panel after panel with captions like: “Check that out.” “And that.” “And that…”

Garouden is about Bunshichi Tanba, a street brawler who beats up martial arts celebrities and breaks gyms (to “break” a gym/dojo/school is to arrive unannounced and defeat its most powerful representatives). Tanba visits a gym owned by the Federation of Amateur Wrestling, and after suffering a humiliating defeat, retreats from the public eye for three years in order to reach his next plateau of ability. He comes back better than ever and sets the world of martial arts on fire, finding himself in the middle of a karate tournament that’s opened its doors to all fighting styles for the first time ever.

Similar to Tough, the majority of the appeal of Garouden is the spectacle of strong men engaged in often-mortal combat. Bunshichi Tanba is a refreshing protagonist, having no pathos or motivation outside of the pure desire to win fights. Still, the manga acquires the familiar pacing of any using the tournament as a narrative structure: fighters are introduced, battle each other outside of the ring, reveal their psychological histories and motivations inside the ring, and end their fights on either amicable terms or with a greater sense of respect for one another.

The most recent volume of Garouden came out in 2010, and there hasn’t been word on when to expect more. I can’t imagine any licensing company chomping at the bit to release a MMA manga both twenty-five volumes long and on indefinite hiatus, but wouldn’t it be rad if they did?