Ping Pong, Vol. 1

Ping Pong is a story about competitive high school ping pong and, at its heart, about a friendship.

It's been a few years since I've read this manga in full, but the impression it left on me was huge. Taiyo Matsumoto's art style is singular, unmistakable, his dialogue and characters and the way he builds a narrative masterful. From what I've read this translation is good. I can't wait to buy and reread it in full when it's released (I don't really want to reread it with those watermarks on every page, and I want to experience it again with the physical copy in my hands).

I remember seeing the film of Ping Pong back in 2002 - just after I came back from a trip to Japan. I remember liking it a lot, there was something about the use of this odd indoor sport, heavy on reaction timing and stylistic quirks, that bought out the exaggerated extremes in the personalities of its leads. So now, finally, I get to read eighteen years later a translation of the manga it is based on, and discover quite how much in common they have. Japanese sports manga are a large genre, and one I know little about, but even so my sense is that Ping Pong is more interested in some of that coming of age stuff, than the game - despite the manga probably being about 75% gameplay.

One of the things that impressed me about the film was the innovative (SFX heavy) presentation of the sports action scenes. Table Tennis is a fast game, but very contained. The film came out just after the innovation of bullet time, and that, and some computer graphics made it visually very exciting. But the book - whilst formally quite traditional - excels are the near impossible p visualising ping pong playing styles, motion, speed, and the action. Whilst splattered "Pok Pok" effects give us the rhythm and the sound of the game, we also get trainer squeaks, squeals as the scores mount up. About a third of the 500 pages here are taken up with a regional tournament, and three games in particular, and you can glean the player style from the presentation. The art is jerky but precise, its very clean linework (one of those lovelythin technical drawing pens) particularly wobbly on renditions of advertising logos, but clean on the four or five telling traits of its lead characters. There are occasional flips to colour linework, but it is mainly in very stark uncoloured black and white, which is a contrast to the story being told which at the heart of it is trying to reconcile the personalities of the kids, with the personality of a winner. Is it sportsmanlike to play down to a weaker opponent? What role does confidence, arrogance and personality play?

The volume starts pretty philosophically, but once we get into the tournaments it has little time for its observation that blood tastes like metal. This volume finishes on a mild cliffhanger, there are more games to be played and one of the leads has sacked off of Table Tennis (and I can remember what happens in the film, so know there is more to come). I don't know enough Manga to judge it within the genre, but after a slowish start it really finds its own storytelling pace (which is at once breathless and extremely decompressed) and I want to come back and see how this plays out in the next volume. I have never been the best at reading action in comics, and there is a lot of quite frenetic action here, and so I am impressed with how well it worked, and sucked me in. My sense is this is a bit of a classic from the film, and its overall presentation, and like any kind of classic it has its was of drawing in even a casual reader of manga.

[NetGalley ARC]