Ashita no Joe

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Volume 19 is out, and according to Hox (the scanlator), volume 20 will be out on the 27th, which is just a week from now. Even though I've already seen the ending in the anime, I can't wait to go through it again in manga form.

[LumRanmaYasha]

It'd be nice if Hox translated Kyojin no Hoshi next. He did a good job with AnJ.

It's great that the manga will finally be completely translated. I look forward to next monday.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

He probably won't get to any other Takamori-written manga for a while, if ever. I believe he stated in the comments section of one of his blog posts for AnJ that he has other projects that he's working on, and only put them on hold just to finish the rest of AnJ up first. For that much, I'm pretty grateful, because if he didn't do it, we'd probably have the rest of the series untranslated for years. Now it will at least be possible to read the entire story from start to finish via the manga. In a way I kind of regret having finished the series via the anime, first. Don't get me wrong, AnJ2 was a great adaptation, but I still would have preferred finishing the story in the format that I started it with, being the manga. Had I known that the releases would be complete in just a matter of a few months, I would've waited instead.

That said, even so, it didn't ruin the impact or quality of the series nearly enough to stop it from being a favorite of mine. It's still my new favorite manga, and AnJ2 is still one of my new favorite anime, so that's really a testament to the sheer timelessness of this story as classic work of fiction.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Favorite manga of all time confirmed. Now that its finally all translated into English, nobody has an excuse not to read it.

[LumRanmaYasha]

Ah, I forgot the final volume was going to be released today. Good, time to finish my new favorite manga.   

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

BTW, CX, after you finish it, this is required reading: http://hoxtranslations.blogspot.com/2014/04/many-thoughts-on-good-manga-10.html?m=1

Hox is my new fucking hero. And this easily puts my own AnJ article to shame.

[LumRanmaYasha]

That was a very insightful article. I had no idea about the series' connections to the gekiga movement and how innovative Chiba's art was at the time. I also didn't even think about the similarities between Yoko and Joe before, but he put that relationship in perspective. Not only that, but I had no idea Chiba altered Takamori's original ending to it's iconic, ambiguous form either, and that and the reasons why the ending is ambiguous and what it represents thematically are things that I don't think I could have possibly understood without the information that Hox knows. His take on the cultural relevance and analysis of the subtleties of the characters and their development does a great job illustrating just why the series is such an important, powerful work and one of the best in the medium.

His article also makes me lament not knowing japanese, since I'd love to read many of the titles he references in his article, but most of them are untranslated. Not only that, but as I've been researching series I want to read recently, I discovered many interesting titles that, sadly, have no english translation yet. It's a real shame, since I'd bet there are many classic series from the 60-70's period in particular that would likely be excellent reads. It's not like my backlog isn't already big enough as it is, but it is something that motivates me to try and learn the language, sometime.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I didn't get a chance to comment about the article, but goddamn was it incredibly well-written. I have really appreciated Hox's very natural sounding translations for this series. Most translators go for a very raw kind of sentence structure that sounds strange in English. With Hox, you could honestly mistake his dialogue for something you'd expect in an official release from Viz or another NA manga distributor. I'm so glad that he's going back to redo the first 6 volumes (which, BTW, weren't done by him).

As for the article, he hit the nail on the head with why Joe and Yoko are the 2 best characters in the manga. I really agree with him about their similarities, and how Joe hit her too cost to home when he criticized her philanthropy as nothing more than publicity to make herself feel like a good person. I also love how he explains why it's OK for Joe and Yoko to be morally gray characters and still have them be endearing. He also tried to defend Matsutaro a little bit given how much heat that anime got, which almost makes me want to give it another chance, though I still attest that Joe is a better character because his lack of moral in the beginning of the series had an actual good reason behind it, whereas Matsutaro really doesn't share the same excuse.

By far, though, the 2 points I agreed with him the most on were in regard to the character development and artwork. With the former, too many modern shounen just attribute character development to characters having major changes after a major event that relates to them, rather than having them gradually, subtly grow and mature over time. Case in point being Naruto and almost any other shounen of its ilk out there. You'll have a villain characters he'll have some bad outlook on life because of whatever cliche reason, and he'll get defeated by the hero and almost immediately become a good guy. Joe is so ahead of its time in how skillfully the character development is handled. As for the artwork, Togashi really needs to take notes, as do many other shounen mangaka. Simply explaining what a character is feeling at any given moment ruins the pleasure of viewer interpretation and the re-read value that comes with it. There are so many silent scenes in AnJ where an entire piece of narrative can be so clearly delivered without a single word of text, but rather just the facial expressions of the characters. I REALLY wish that more shounen (and even some seinen) mangaka could do this effectively.

I really want other people on this board to read this article, but unfortunately it's something that I could never recommend to anyone unless they finished the series first, so I'll have to abstain from that.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I've re-read it several times, and I'm pretty sure that AnJ volume 9 is not only my favorite volume of the series, but also of any manga or comic that I've ever read, period. The artwork is top-notch to the point where so much is communicated to the reader without the need for dialogue, and the dialogue that is there is very heartfelt and full of raw emotion. The funny thing is that there isn't a single major boxing match in the entire volume. It's purely just about the characters and reveals just how truly layered and nuanced they all are. Plus, as far as the manga goes, it's pretty much the last time that Nishi gets some good characterization focus, since he just fades into the background for most of the second half of the series.

This is also the part where Yoko starts developing into one of the best characters in the series, coming a long way from the naive rich girl that she was up to this point. It's funny how a manga from over 40 years ago has better character development for its female lead than 99% of any modern shounen series.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

So, are you ever going to give your ratings for each arc, CX?

BTW i've read through the entire series twice already, and have gone tht ought my favorite parts multiple more times. It's still my favorite manga ever.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

By now I've re-read most of this manga twice over (making for 3 times total), and no, I'm not joking, here. In just a year, I've already gone back to it so much because I just find the material to be that potent that it begs to be revisited.

Just like with Dragon Ball,  I'm going to rank the arcs from my least favorite to favorite.

10. Harimau
9. Doya Town (Tokyo Slums)
8. Hawaii
7. Dragon Kim
6. Juvenile Prison
5. Jose Mendoza
4. Rising Star
3. Carlos Rivera
2. Rikiishi Tooru
1. The Fall of Joe Yabuki

Upon re-reads, I can say that Harimau wasn't really a bad arc, but just felt rather unecessary. That's what I like to call a "serialization filler" arc, in that it was probably just written to prolong the story as if you cut it out, it wouldn't really have much effect on the story or character development even if it was gone. Every other arc in the series was great, though, and felt necessary. Admittedly it's a bit hard to go back to the Tokyo Slums arc (and I'm not sure if this is correct, but I've seen that the town actually has a name, and it's called Doya Town), which is fun and entertaining to be sure, but upon re-reads, it clearly lacks the depth and nuance in the writing quality that all of the later arcs had. Everything else in the series is great, and I don't use the word great lightly.

[LumRanmaYasha]

So, are you ever going to give your ratings for each arc, CX?

I realized I still haven't done this. Maybe I'll get to it sometime soon.

For now, though:

10. Doya Town (Tokyo Slums)
9. Harimao
8. Hawaii
7. Juvenile Prison
6. Dragon Kim
5. Rising Star
4. Jose Mendoza
3. Carlos Rivera
2. Rikishii Tooru
1. The Fall of Joe Yabuki

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

So, I've been re-reading this manga off and on over the past few months. Of course, it's almost unbelievable to me how my appreciation for it only grows the more that I view it as time goes by. That said, I wanted to rectify a personal little label that I gave to a particularly excellent story arc from this series.

That of course would be The Fall of Joe Yabuki arc, a title which I made up on the spot since this series is not nearly popular enough in the West to have fan-standardized names for each arc. That said, on my most recent read-through of this arc, it occurred to me that Joe Yabuki starts out at, or at least near, his lowest point. By the end of it, which I mark as the point just before he meets Yoko at her mansion, he has done a complete turn-around and has ignited a new fire and drive within himself. That's hardly what I would call "falling," and Joe really had his fall between the Rikiishi arc and the end of Part 1 of the manga.

As I had described in my write-up for this story last year, it detailed the break-down and subsequent build-up into the iconic character that Joe became known as in Japan. That's just it; by the end of this arc, Joe has, in a sense, been re-constructed as a character. Thus, I personally feel that it would be more appropriate to title this arc as The Rebirth of Joe Yabuki (or maybe "Revival" in place of Rebirth if that sounds a bit too extreme of a term to use). Perhaps a bit pretentious, I'll grant you, but it's certainly more fitting than the previous title that I gave it.

[LumRanmaYasha]

Good point. I wish either of us had considered that before we labeled it like we did in our list. 

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Well, I could always go back and edit it later on, when I have the time.