COMICS: I finally read Dan Mes Yeux and Polina by Bastien Vives after following his blog for years. They were both very good in different ways, though neither struck me as great. Vives is still pretty young, and from what I can tell his work is getting better and better. I’m especially impressed by his range both thematically and stylistically. I also just really like his approach to digital drawing — the way he embraces the artificially of the lines he is making, I guess. He doesn’t try to make drawings done in Photoshop look like anything other than drawings done in Photoshop.

Some other greatest hits for me were Stigmata, the work of Dave Kiersch, the work of Ryan Cecil Smith, S., Lupus, and other things I’m forgetting. A lot of people liked Winschluss’ Pinocchino…it’s been a while since I read it but when I did I liked it too. I did a terrible job of keeping up with manga this year. Cross Game is really good, Bakuman is consistently entertaining, and at this point Urasawa is clearly one of the all-time greats.

WEBCOMICS: I barely know how to work the Internet, as evidenced by the 1995 html coding of my website, so maybe take these recommendations with a grain of salt. I mean, the relative regularity with which I discover really good cartoonists online makes me think that there is lots of great stuff out there to which I am completely oblivious. Anyways, Forming continues to move along excellently. A few parts of Jason Overby’s 2101 faltered for me but it was great overall. Warren Craghead did two great comics for the Hooded Utilitarian. I really love the way he draws. I was really enjoying Connor Willumsen’s Everett and I wish he would get back to that, though the two Moebius inspired stories he posted recently were also good. Joe Decie’s online comics are idiosyncratic in the best way. Ruppert and Mulot posted a great story about Elvis early in the year.

BOOKS: I don’t really read non-fiction books for pleasure because I have to plow through so much of that stuff for school, so we’re all about novels here. I got into Haruki Murakami in a big way this year. I’m still working my way through as much Italo Calvino as I can find, and enjoying it immensely. Read a few Cormac McCarthy books in there as well and listened to A Song of Fire and Ice. It’s good light entertainment for drawing, but not sure it would be worth my time as a book. My book of the year was probably Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Murakami, but the unexpected success award undoubtedly goes to Cockfighter by Charles Willeford. Just an incredibly solid , well-told story without any frills or misplaced literary aspirations. I really loved it.

MUSIC: I am the worst at music. I like Los Campesinos. I like the Barenaked Ladies. I like rap sometimes. I don’t know.

MOVIES: Don’t really do these either. Sorry. I don’t think I even saw ten movies this year. Ghost Protocol was the best possible version of what it was supposed to be, excluding the times when they tried too hard to do the having-a-real-plot thing. Nothing else notable that I can think of. Zzzzz.

TV: I think the Sherlock miniseries on BBC is the best Sherlock Holmes adaptation I have seen. Actually, nevermind, because that is a terrible yardstick. It is just a great show that makes you feel smart, which is exactly what a show about a genius detective should do. It might have come out in 2010, I think? Oh well. A second season is on the way. Community is funny some of the time. Parks and Rec is funny most of the time. I would probably watch The Office at this point even if it was terrible, although I’m pretty sure that it is not.

PODCASTS: I think the extent to which you find this funny is an indication of how regularly you listen to the usual suspects on NPR. I found it very funny. I also like On the Media, Radiolab, and the Ink Panthers Show, among others. Inkstuds, Comix Claptrap and all the other comics things are good if they have interesting guests. For my money, best audio interviews of the year go to Al Columbia and Sammy Harkham. Joe McCulloch’s two podcast appearances late in the year were hits as well.

WRITING: Man, I don’t even know. There were lots of good things. I could link you to all the politics blogs that I read, but who cares about that stuff? We’re here to talk about comic books. I am as thrilled with Tom Spurgeon’s Holiday Interview Series this year as I have been for as long as I have followed it. Every day of that has been essential reading, as was Spurgeon’s All of These Things That Have Made Us. I miss the days when Frank Santoro wrote his own column. Brandon Graham’s blog posts remain consistently outstanding and there is at least one gem in each of the many interviews he has done over the course of the year. Abhay Khosla can make me laugh out loud even when he writes about comics that I haven’t read and don’t really care about. Other favorites are: Joe McCulloch on Cross Game although mostly on manga production, actually; Sean Witzke on Airtight Garage; Sean Michael Robinson on Gasoline Alley; James Romberger on Sammy Harkham; HARVEYJAMES on the homicidal tendencies of Dan Clowes; Ryan Holmberg on Alternative Manga; and Matt Seneca interviewing J-Shasta. There you go. That’s enough for at least one sleepless night of reading. Happy New Year, everybody.

I suppose I should begin with a disclaimer of sorts. I grew up with shonen manga in the way that many people grow up with superhero comics. I spent hours upon hours devouring the stuff almost irrespectively of quality, hardly reading anything else for years. Needless to say, I can’t help but be somewhat biased when writing about something like Cross Game; after all, sports manga were always my favorite. Therefore, before I talk about the comic itself, I’d like to briefly discuss the sports manga genre in general.

Comics centered on sports are a subset of shonen manga that have been popular in Japan for quite a few years, although for some reason they haven’t yet caught on as substantially in the United States. Like any good genre, sports manga has more than its share of tropes and clichés. In almost all cases, it essentially follows the formulas of other shonen manga, but with bats and balls instead of swords and guns. It’s replete with the kind of exaggeration and excess that makes it incredibly appealing to young teenage boys, who are of course the target demographic for this material.

Actually, instead of telling you, I’ll just show you. Here are four spreads from four different sports manga, each focused on a different sport and spanning between them nearly twenty years of Japanese publishing history (all read right to left, of course):

from Eyeshield 21 by Riichiro Inagaki and Yusuke Murata

from Slam Dunk by Takehiko Inoue

from Captain Tsubasa by Yoichi Takahashi

from ???

Okay, so maybe that last example (courtesy of Brandon Graham) is a little over the top. Still, you get the idea. These comics relish in the excitement and speed of sports to such an extent that over the top, exuberant sequences like those above become very frequent. In fact, it is rare than any plot twist or revelation in sports manga is not presented in this hyperbolic manner.

Cross Game, however, is different. Admittedly, it does conform to many sports manga tropes, but its sensibility is unique in a number of ways. Cross Game certainly has its moments of excitement, but Adachi’s approach to pacing and composition gives the comic an overall more serene, measured mood. This, to me, is one of the most interesting and enjoyable aspects of the series.

from Cross Game

Perhaps the clearest example of this phenomenon is something that that both Derik Badman and I have written about previously. While any more than a brief pause in the (physical, or in some cases emotional) action is anathema to most sports manga, Adachi fills Cross Game with a series of visual pauses (as in the page seen above) that remove the sense of frantic energy which most other works in the genre exude. These shots, usually of weather or environment, range in length from an entire page to just a single panel. The technique sometimes serves as an indication of time passing, though in other cases it seems to simply offer a brief, non-temporal pause in the narrative, a chance for readers to exhale and collect their thoughts. Adachi never seems particularly eager to move his story forward too quickly, in other words, and in a way this makes his work a good fit for the slow moving game of baseball (around which, it should be noted, much of his oeuvre centers).

Sometimes, though, Adachi’s pacing adheres firmly to the norms of sports manga and even shonen manga in general. For instance, he often alternates briskly between two or more scenes, cutting away from points of climax to create a sense of suspense and forward momentum. This is a common technique throughout all types of shonen manga, as in addition to developing tension it allows for character development and plot to be slipped in between the action sequences that, through both convention and editorial mandate, can never be too far away. However, the way Adachi structures his action scenes serves to undercut that tension in a very interesting way. A prime example is the following spread from Chapter 2 of Volume 1, when protagonist Ko Kitamura hits the first of many home runs:

from Cross Game

The composition of these pages is, in a subtle way, quite inventive. By convention, this should be a key early moment in the series. This is the big reveal, where we are surprised and thrilled to learn that our bumbling, sympathetic protagonist also happens to be an athletic prodigy. It’s an essential, infinitely replicated moment in any sports manga, and this of course means in most cases that it is revealed in a cinematic, high-energy fashion.

Adachi, on the other hand, focuses here on a series of smaller moments as the ball moves towards home plate, and doesn’t even show the big swing itself (or even the pitch, really). In a way, this is not dissimilar to the visual pauses taken between scenes in it both slowes and fragments the reader’s perception of time. This again is not uncommon in sports manga, as it is another easy way to build tension before a big reveal. However, Adachi uses the technique more as a means of deemphasizing the action inherent in this sequence. Almost all of the actual motion here is happening between the panels, even though the sequence reads very clearly. This is still an exciting moment, but it’s certainly not as dynamic or exaggerated as the examples from other sports manga at the beginning of this post. Such slight variations on common techniques contribute to the strange sense of calm and serenity that in my reading underscores the more overt action and excitement of Cross Game.

Aside from the differences in technique that I’ve described here, it is also notable that the plot of Cross Game extends briefly in directions that are uncommon for sports manga, as indicated most clearly by Wakaba’s death in the first volume. In a sense, Adachi just takes a more realistic approach to sports manga than his contemporaries, almost seeming to argue through his aesthetic that both sports and life in general do not always jump cleanly from one high-energy moment to another. Overall, I see Cross Game as both a simple, well-executed sports manga and a subtle subversion of that genre’s conventions. Adachi strikes a fine line between simply succeeding within strict genre constraints and subtly transcending those constraints. He doesn’t go too far in the latter direction, of course, but the moments when he does were, for me at least, some of the most memorable and unique in Cross Game. This is not a great comic, but it’s a very good comic that illustrates the unique voice which Adachi has been able to establish and maintain throughout his very lengthy career.