04.10.2010 - Terrence Marks:

I've mentioned Mitsuru Adachi before. Cross Game, his most recent manga, is licensed in the US. This is cool.

He's very popular in Japan, but the only manga that got officially translated was two volumes of Short Program, a collection of short stories. They've also been out of print for several years.

I haven't read Cross Game. It's a lighthearted story that centers around high school romance and sports, much like his other mangas, Nine, Touch, H2, Rough, Katsu, and Slow Step. He's been working in that field for a long while and has gotten very good in it. (I mentioned short stories earlier - those aren't them. He's had about a dozen major series, depending on how you count).

I recently finished reading Touch, one of his earlier series. It is slow and deliberate. All his work is like that, but Touch is moreso. The storytelling is extremely decompressed - at 20 pages a week, he's allowed to be. It reminds me of Debussy, in that it's not about the individual notes, but about how the collections of notes interact with each other. It's a story where the default unit of storytelling is not the panel or the page, but the chapter.

I explain that poorly, I suppose. I enjoyed it, but felt the secondary characters were underused.

Anyhow, I read all 5000 pages in the last few weeks. When I write You Say it First, the first draft of each comic takes up about two pages of glances, counter-glances, establishing shots, and pauses. Then I cut it down to five panels, and, finally, to three.

Also, he makes sideburns look awesome, but that's neither here nor there.

I enjoyed it. I liked his manga, Rough, more, but he did that a decade later and it's good that he gets even better. Rough is one of the best mangas I've read

What I'm trying to say is that I intend to buy it when it comes out in October and if you like You Say it First, you'll probably like it.