There’s a conversation that almost always starts when someone mentions a sports manga like Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game (from Viz’s Shônen Sunday imprint). Those among us who left athletic pursuits behind as soon as society permitted it (basically, once we had completed our high-school physical education requirements) ask if the comic is about sports or about people who play sports. Will we, as conscientious objectors to competitive athletics, be asked to care about the minutiae of some particular sport, an interest many of us cannot be bothered to fake even for loved ones, or do we just need to like the characters and let the details wash over us?

While the details of baseball matter to a certain extent in Cross Game, they’re easy enough to ignore in the wake of the characters, a complex and sympathetic group who also manage to be idiosyncratic and funny a lot of the time. In other words, Cross Game is undeniably about baseball, but it’s not so much about baseball that people who don’t give a fig about the sport won’t find their price of admission paid in a variety of other ways.

One of those ways is Adachi’s own idiosyncratic nature as a creator. The tone of the three-volume introduction to Cross Game shifts a great deal from chapter to chapter, sometimes page to page, but the shifts work. Low comedy sits comfortably next to innocent romance, just as sly slice-of-life isn’t out of place near unexpected tragedy. It really is marvelous to watch Adachi mix and match but still make all of these disparate bits seem like they’re part of the same whole.

Part of that has to be due to his fluid art style. It’s got innocence to it and simplicity of line, but that doesn’t keep it from exhibiting strength and wonder. I sometimes think that’s one of Tezuka’s greatest contributions to cartooning – abundant evidence that something can be simultaneously cute and forceful, goofy and moving, delicate and muscular. Adachi lives up to Tezuka’s example nicely, even throwing in some of the master’s bits of fourth-wall breakage. He also does a nice job with the small modulations of a cast that ages about five years over the book’s three volumes.

Another part is that he writes well, particularly in terms of creating engaging, root-worthy characters with a few simple strokes. We meet average kid Ko Kitamura, son of the local sporting goods franchise and an indifferent athlete, and we’re introduced to the four Tsukishima sisters, heirs to the local batting cage and café. It’s clear that Ko is our core protagonist, but it’s equally clear that the manga isn’t really about people standing around and admiring him. It feels like an ensemble piece, even if it isn’t in its secret heart, but it’s always nice when a creator goes to the effort of camouflaging the obvious conclusion.

The first collection reads in a breeze, and I’m fairly sure that the only reasonable response when setting it down is, “That was really, really nice.” The rather odd back-cover text suggests that Cross Game “will change your perception of what shônen manga can be,” which might be asking too much of it, but it’s got an off-kilter quality – a willingness to give its subject a sidelong glance rather than charge at it — that certainly helps it stand out from the pack. It’s unusual and, partly because of that, kind of lovely.

(This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher. You can read the first chapter on Viz’s Shônen Sunday site.)

March Story (Viz), written by Hyung Min Kim and illustrated by Kyung-il Yang, does not lead with its best foot, in my opinion. It’s nominally in the “comeuppance theatre” category of storytelling in that it’s largely episodic and features terrible but avoidable things happening to guest stars with a protagonist swooping in to try and minimize the damage. But unlike my favorite examples of comeuppance theatre, bad things don’t happen to these people because they themselves are bad, but because they’re kind of dumb. I’m going to put the rest of this entry behind a jump, because it’s less of a review than a spoiler-filled, inexplicably obsessive discussion.

In this comic, which originally ran in Shogakukan’s Sunday GX, beautiful objects can leave their admirers vulnerable to possession by evil spirits called “Ill.” In the first chapter, a young girl is explicitly warned not to touch unknown objects. She’s told what might happen, and she seems to grasp the possible consequences. Then she sees something pretty and sparkly lying around, and caution goes out the window with predictable results. March, our titular hero, tries to salvage the situation, but it’s hard to care all that much.

In the second chapter, a character has apparently reached out to March for assistance only to immediately and willfully prevent March from intervening in any constructive way. The reason for this is fairly skeletal, insufficient in any persuasive essentials since the supplicant is rendered in shorthand, and it’s hard not to suspect that this beautiful, European-esque landscape is filled with idiots and that Darwinian principles should be allowed to run their course, you know?

In the third chapter, March is sought out not by a victim of the objects that can wreak such havoc but by a dealer in curios who is apparently kind of a sadist. He knows he’s releasing ill-infected objects among his clientele, but he’s more interested in seeing how things will play out than in preventing them from happening in the first place. It’s novel, since the Ill’s victims in this case have no way of avoiding their misfortunes. But still, someone who knows better fails to act in a responsible, even sensible way.

It’s weird. It feels like the creators are absolving you from caring about what happens to their characters, though perhaps they just don’t have a particularly firm grasp on the difference between things that are tragic and things that are just kind of stupid. If a tree falls in the forest, should you feel badly for the person who runs to be under it when it crashes to the ground as people shout to warn them what the result will be?

The thing is, the fourth chapter is great. It’s creepy and tragic and roughly one thousand times more interesting than the chapters that come before it, and my regard should be evident in the fact that I’m reluctant to spoil anything that actually happens in the story. It makes you wonder how the earlier chapters would have read if you’d known March’s back story before you’d slogged through a bunch of pages of bad things happening to stupid people because they’re stupid.

I’m reminded of the experience of reading the first couple of volumes of Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket (Tokyopop), which were undeniably generic. The events of those first two volumes, when viewed through the prism of later events and revelations, become essential only in retrospect, but the power of those later moments would not have been possible without slogging through the early bland bits. For people who will never be persuaded by a comparison to Fruits Basket, I’d throw in the first issue of Kurt Busiek’s Thunderbolts (Marvel), which seemed like a totally bland super-team comic until the last-page reveal in the first issue.

Am I saying that March Story is going to reach Fruits Basket or Thunderbolts heights? I have no idea, and the Fruits Basket-Thunderbolts analogy isn’t really very apt, because the power of the fourth chapter is entirely independent of anything that happened before. The earlier chapters suggest March as a master of ceremonies rather than a protagonist. One could successfully argue that the whole reading experience might have been more enticing if the first three chapters had been pitched entirely and the readers had been thrust into the middle of things, wondering about the tragic figure who would become the hero as opposed to the host who’s in every chapter.

But, unearned as my interest is by 75% of the first volume’s content, it does indeed have my interest for at least another volume. The book is beautifully drawn throughout, and while the creators only took one of four opportunities to indicate that they have anything interesting in mind for the series, they made more than any reasonable reader could have expected of that one opportunity.

Again… weird. Has anyone else read this? I’ve made a point of not reading any reviews, but I’ll happily add links now that I’ve rambled on at unnecessary length.