Ping Pong

Peco and Smile have played table tennis together since childhood. Peco is loud, arrogant and gifted; Smile is withdrawn and, according to their coach, considerably more talented but unwilling to win.

The series follows them and three rivals through a regional tournament, and is less about the outcome than about what each player wants from the game.

One of them loves the game and cannot win. The other can win and does not care.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The series' actual subject is the distribution of ability and what it does to people: those who have it and squander it, those who work and remain insufficient, and those who are good enough to know they will never be great.

Every one of the five central players has a different relationship to this, and none of the answers is presented as correct.

He is emotionally withdrawn to the point of absence, plays without visible pleasure, and has been protecting Peco by losing to him since they were children.

His arc toward wanting to win is the series' spine, and it is written as a recovery rather than as an improvement.

Loose, distorted, aggressively unconventional, with warped perspective, scratchy linework and figures that stretch and compress according to movement.

It is among the most distinctive styles in the medium and is divisive: it reads as either extraordinarily kinetic or as simply ugly, depending on the reader.

The table tennis is rendered through distortion rather than through accuracy: a swing may occupy a full page as a blur, and a rally may be drawn as a sequence of impossible postures.

The approach conveys speed and strain better than a realistic style would, and the sport sequences are among the best action drawing in this section.

Dragon, Akuma and Kong each embody a different position — discipline without joy, effort without talent, ambition displaced by circumstance — and each is given real interiority.

The series is unusually generous to the players who lose, and several of its strongest passages belong to characters who are eliminated.

Five volumes, which is very short, and the series is correspondingly concentrated with no digression at all.

The brevity is a substantial part of its quality. The material is exactly as long as it needs to be, which distinguishes it sharply from most sports manga.

Peco casts himself as a hero throughout, in language borrowed from comics, and the series takes that self-mythologising seriously rather than mocking it.

The eventual question is whether anyone can be a hero to someone else, and the answer it gives is modest and specific.

It is bleak in places and genuinely warm in others, and the emotional register is much closer to literary fiction than to the sports genre's usual encouragement.

Nothing is resolved by trying harder, and several characters end in situations they did not want and cannot change.

Tekkonkinkreet and Sunny share the same formal restlessness applied to street children and to a children's home respectively.

He is among the medium's genuine stylists, and readers who respond to the drawing here should certainly continue to the others. He has also collaborated on animation and picture books, and his work has been exhibited as fine art, which is unusual for a manga author of his generation.

A 2014 animated series by Masaaki Yuasa preserves the distortion and is widely considered one of the best adaptations in the medium, with a visual approach as unconventional as the source.

It is a rare case where the animation does not normalise a difficult style, and either version is a legitimate way in.

Readers who want sports fiction about failure and ability rather than about victory, and who can accept extremely unconventional drawing.

It is short, complete and among the best things in this section. Readers put off by the art in the first few pages should give it a volume, since the style's logic becomes apparent in motion.