I ain’t ever seen a team want the W as hard as these Karasuno Crow boys. Daichi the team captain got knocked out crashing into Tanaka when they both dove for a ball. My man lost a tooth and was bleeding from the mouth. He told Tanaka, “My fault, you called it but I couldn’t stop my body. That’s on me. But hey, look, you put us up in points.” That’s how you lead muthafuckas on a court while you get taken off the court. Daichi was out there putting his parents’ dental insurance to use for the love of the game, baby. That’s the heart I’m talking about. That’s the captain of a team I wanna serve under. Matter of fact, Haikyuu!! is the anime universe I wanna live in. Haikyuu!! is where I wanna own a mortgage. This whole atmosphere is where I’d thrive.
I don’t even have to be on the volleyball team. Lemme be the water boy. Lemme get these kids hydrated with Alaskan glacier water. Fuck, I’ll even be the ball boy just so I could say I was there to witness the greatness. I would love to be on the team, but the way my passion works, they’d have to censor my trash talk. Soon as the shit talking started from another team, I’d make it a point to receive every ball in play. I’m talking running outta bounds, jumping off walls, diving into the audiences for this shit. That’s me. That ball ain’t touching the ground on my watch. Not while I’m breathing. Not with these teams out here saying we flightless crows. Saying we can’t and ain’t fly when that’s literally our volleyball club slogan? Lemme put the Denzel Washington voice on as I say this cause no. Nooooo. I don’t accept that. Ever. I reject that. Karasuno ain’t come all this way just to say we came this far. I would still be civil and shake hands with the other team after we win. I just noticed each team that loses always says “We’ll beat you next time” respectfully, and Karasuno members are always polite in telling them “We won’t lose!” in response. Listen, if any team steps to me after a game saying that it’ll beat me next time, I’m letting it know, it gon’ get its shit rocked… again. Fuck they think this is? Our team captain lost a tooth for a dive. Y’all ain’t got that kinda heart. Y’all soft. Your spikes felt like sprinkles being placed on cupcakes. Weak. Your serves were nothing but soft serve ice cream. Lacking. Fuck outta here with that shit. Listen, I’m all for friendly competition, but they are not ready for the real-cash shit level of trash talk I’d bring to the court when provoked.
Haikyuu!! got me wanting a #13 Karasuno Crows jersey, man. I’m dedicated to the team, yo. There was an episode when the third-years were thinking of retiring and the ace Asahi told Sugawara and Daichi that he was staying on to try and get the team to nationals. He said, “I’m not even going to college anyway.” That’s what the fuck I’m talking about right there. He knows ball is muthafucking life. Fuck a college degree. It’s about getting the team to nationals, graduating, opening up a convenience store like Coach Ukai, and then getting that #1 draft pick for the Neighborhood Association volleyball team. Don’t you dare say ball is life if you ain’t ’bout that life like Asahi. My #10 Shōyō Hinata Karasuno jersey cosplay uniform that came in the mail says I am ’bout this fucking life right here, baby. Haikyuu!! got me in my local YMCA on the v-ball court nettin’. Working on my serves to make it out the hood. Got me thinking I gotta turn my life around at thirty-six years old ’cause I went to college like a loser when I shoulda been ballin’. Argh, it may be too late for me to go pro, but when I’m in my Karasuno jersey cosplay with the short shorts to match, I know I can still go Crow.
I Read Mark Millar’s Jupiter’s Legacy and I Saw the Father I Am and the Father I Hope I Never Have to Be
WILLIAM EVANS, aka Papa Power Trip
HOLIDAY WEEKENDS, IN the imagined psychic lie I construct for myself, are supposed to be super-productive days. I spend the waking hours of the workweek doing a job that does not feed my creative necessities, so being off for three days or more should be my “get shit done” days. But recently, at the praising and properly hyped recommendation from Black Nerd Problems contributor Ja-Quan, I found myself instead venturing into my comics to-do list. I had only meant to read the first couple of issues of Jupiter’s Legacy. I had only meant to read the first volume of Jupiter’s Legacy. I had only meant to see how Jupiter’s Circle started. Within a few hours, I had read the entire series, including the Legacy vol. 2 conclusion, the single issue that released this week. Yes, Mark Millar is a brilliant and innovative writer. This is a known and verifiable thing. I wasn’t surprised at the efficient and beautiful locomotion of the story. I was most drawn in by the proposal and questioning of legacy itself, as it’s something I feel the grip of each and every day.
Jupiter’s Legacy essentially begins with a Caesarian story: the plot to murder a king. After being granted powers on a remote island during the 1930s, the Utopian, the world’s greatest hero, leads America back to prominence. For a time. Along with his fellow heroes (once dubbed the Union), time has moved on even if the Utopian and his puritan ideals have not. He’s a father of two children, both inheriting superior powers, both initially unable to live up to their father’s incorruptibility. Eventually, the Utopian has alienated enough people over a long enough timeline that they have imagined a world that continues to spin without him in it, with his own son, Brandon, providing the final wound on the senate floor.
Reading through this series, I realized that I am no one and everyone in these panels. While this story is of course wrapped in flight, heat vision, telekinesis, and the stakes of the entire world hung above the head of its characters, it is at its core about parenting and parentage. To know me for a day is to know that I think that my father is a brilliant man. And while either an endorsement or a detriment to that statement, I am also aware that I am very much my father’s son.
I graduated with my undergrad from The Ohio State University at the age of thirty-four. My father graduated with his master’s degree in chemistry before he turned twenty-four. By the time he was thirty, he and my mother were sacrificing a lot on the way to lifting us (and my yet to be born sister) from the previous lower economic state that both of their families existed in. He ascended highly within his job at a Fortune 100 company and worked tirelessly there and at home, all of which was a precursor to my sister and I having little excuse to not succeed in some fashion once we left the nest. My father, who is a good man, was, but is, far from the pillar of humanity that is depicted by the Utopian in the Jupiter series. I am not the colossal fuckup filled with jealousy and murderous intent that was the Utopian’s son, Brandon. And maybe like the comic, we do exist somewhere in the space between the gods and the Earth they dare not land upon. My father seized on his potential early, while I floated in the undisciplined current downstream from the waterfall he conducted. And yes, I’m aware that is not a condemnation of me, that I was not a failure because I didn’t become my father, at least not at the speed he did. But once, I was a boy with a father. And once, I was a boy with my father’s gifts cloaked in the tower of what he had achieved thus far. No amount of self-esteem makes those constructs disappear overnight.
Legacy is often an abstraction, a word that feels big the way that Titans are. Or the way a parent did in the first memory you can pull in which you needed to be lifted to reach something above your reach. In Jupiter’s Legacy, Millar is the architect of a story doing double the work. On the surface, the story is an informing of what these heroes will leave in their wake, being the first of their kind to shape the world in this way. But while in this fantastical story the heroes are trying to shape the world into something befitting their kids, they also have the responsibility of shaping a nurturing childhood for their kids, befitting the type of individuals that will contribute to that very world they want to protect. No matter how we slice it, the Utopian fails on some level at this. I mean, he is murdered. The social capital he built in life is used as a Trojan horse by his son and fellow heroes to make power grabs in his wake. What the Utopian was willing to bet on was the powers he and Lady Liberty passed down and the unlimited opportunity they provided to their children would be enough. It would carry them to
worthy and ambitious futures.
As I get older, I feel the reach of legacy more and more, hoping to turn out my pockets. Begging to see what I have accumulated, what I have gained that’s worth passing down. Every accomplishment, every missed opportunity, every close call, feels like something being etched into my stone tablet. Some of this, of course, is pure ego, but there’s an equal part of this that is a true question of: What exactly have I done or am I doing that will outlive me? My parents’ legacy, thus far, is elevating their children above structures that limited opportunities for themselves. If I hold the line, send my daughter to a good school, enable an environment that is conducive to her succeeding, the same thing my parents rose into, is that success? Is there credit for not going backward? I have confidence that I have made some impact in the worlds I move through, but is a legacy still a legacy if it doesn’t tangibly benefit my child?
There’s a further analogy from Jupiter’s Legacy that relates to my own story. I’ve always assumed my sister held the larger potential between the two of us. Better artist, wider thinker. But outside of our wildly different personalities, I was the oldest. I felt compelled to maximize the gifts I had early because they looked so much like my father’s gifts. And because of this, adulthood was a lot more of a straight line for me. I had an idea of what I should be doing because our head of family seemed to lay it out for me. My sister was told to take her gifts and just figure it out. Because she is so wildly different than our mother as well, there was no real blueprint for who she was in our household. In Jupiter’s Legacy, Brandon, the man that would slay his father, has a sister, Chloe. I rooted for Chloe, the daughter of the perfect parents, the way I root for my own hardworking sister, optimistic that she is also forging a legacy that she can be proud of. Chloe doesn’t have a part in her father’s demise, but she may not have had access to his guidance as much as Brandon either.
But that’s not my story to tell. The one I can tell is the story of what attempting to build a legacy may cost you. Or cost my father. I remember when my father began to withdraw further into himself during my teenage years. I don’t think my adolescent sensibilities had an opinion of it at the time. When I was angry at him, post-divorce, I pointed at that as some evidence of something. Of him withholding something owed to me, despite the mounting gifts before me with his handwriting on them. Today, I get it. I totally get it. Not because isolation is a thing that one does, but because it is a thing that I do. Sometimes it is for the sake of creativity. But sometimes it’s because it is my best way to see the world I’m trying to impact. It is a single-view stargazing that pulls me away from those I want to affect most. Before reaching the part of the series where the Utopian finally breaks down, finally submits under the weight of trying to be everything to everyone, I wondered, “How does this character deal with all of this?” Isolated, depended upon. The pressure of having such a heavy hand on so many people’s futures.
In the end, what Millar so expertly crafts in Jupiter’s Legacy (and Jupiter’s Circle) is how family is defined. What lasts. What’s usable. And probably most important, what on earth is supposed to come next. What makes for an excellent and thoughtful superhero story is rooted in a much more relatable theme of what we are owed by those that raised us. What our responsibility is in accepting those gifts. And ultimately, what we choose to pass on.
Hajime no Ippo Is Just a Manga about Boxing but I’m Over Here Crying My Guts Out
OMAR HOLMON, aka Volg Zangief’s Cutman
“YOU SHOULD CHECK out this boxing manga,” he said. “You’ll love the action and story,” he said. Seven years later, chapter 1202 of Hajime no Ippo has me staring up into the rain like Vegeta. Remember when P. Diddy shouted, “What I’ma do now? Huh? What I’ma do now? It’s all fucked up now.” That’s how much of a wreck this chapter and series has left me. And I hate that I love that. This is all my friend Ayinde Russell’s fault. In 2010, he told me to check out Hajime no Ippo, created by Morikawa Jouji in 1989. I’ve been hooked ever since. I started the series when it was about eight hundred chapters deep. I read it every day and everywhere I went for months. It’s safe to say major shares of my emotion are invested in Hajime no Ippo.
I’m nervous even writing this because I’m so passionate about the series and I want to do it justice. Hajime no Ippo is an incredibly beautiful story about a kid that falls in love with boxing, but it’s also the most devastating literature I’ve ever kept up with. If you know the series, you know what I mean. If you don’t, then in order to understand the heartbreak you need to get familiar with where it all started for Makunouchi Ippo.
The story takes place in the real-world setting of Japan in the late 1980s, where we meet Makunouchi Ippo, the most polite, modest, and good-natured kid. Period. It’s impossible for you not to love this kid. He doesn’t have time to make friends as he helps out with his mother’s fishing business. His father died at sea saving a crew member’s life. Ippo gets picked on often due to his polite demeanor. By chance, pro boxer Takamura Mamoru happens to be jogging by one day and sees bullies attacking Ippo. Takamura embarrasses the bullies with ease. Ippo is amazed seeing this before passing out. He wakes up in the Kamogawa Boxing Gym (thanks to Takamura), and this is where it all comes together.
That same day, Ippo learns the first steps to throwing a proper punch from Takamura. Ippo hits the heavy bag so hard that skin from his knuckles flies off. Takamura realizes he has power and that his work on the fishing boat has given him the muscular build to be a serious threat as a boxer. Takamura gives Ippo a tape of Mike Tyson, explaining that Tyson’s demeanor was the same as Ippo’s in his youth until he became reborn. After viewing the tape and seeing Tyson’s transformation, Ippo asks the question that’ll haunt him and us for years to come: “What does it mean to be strong? How does it feel to be strong?”
Right there, that’s the moment our boy Ippo gets with the shits. We then witness the trials Ippo endures to prove how serious he is about becoming a pro boxer. Now, there are so many key moments that I can’t cram into this paragraph from early on in the series. All you need to know is that Ippo earns not only the right to get trained at the gym under Takamura’s coach, Kamogawa Genji. He also earns respect and a rival in Miyata Ichirō. Creator Morikawa Jouji is a master storyteller. I’m focusing on Ippo, but there are so many other characters’ stories that get told as they step into the limelight. The cast is so well rounded that you at times forget who’s the main character, as Ippo’s friends and opponents shine. There are few over-the-top opponents that are “evil” as opposed to being straight arrogant asses. Everyone fights for their own reasons and we see them all, getting glimpses into the path that’s brought them in front of the protagonist at the time. Morikawa is able to humanize each character and describes their fighting styles so they stand out. [Fun fact: Morikawa used to be a second (a cornerman in boxing), which explains the in-depth research and visuals he puts into the manga. Every punch and style on display by these characters is explained and a point is made to pay homage to the real-life boxers that made them famous.]
I pointed this out to my father, who grew up on boxing. I told him about a character named Mashiba Ryō that utilizes the Hitman fighting stance and flicker jab made famous by “Thomas ‘the Hitman’ Hearns!” Dad interjected excitedly. “We used to watch the Friday-night Fight of the Week on television and listen to it on the radio. It wasn’t closed-circuit back then,” he says.
Morikawa is paying respect to eras even before my father’s time. He goes all the way back to the 1920s, when Ippo’s signature move, the Dempsey Roll, was created by Jack Dempsey. The technique consists of Ippo weaving his head in a figure eight motion to avoid punches while simultaneously using that momentum to punch from left and right angles.
I love hand-to-hand combat in manga, comics, animation, and live action. What I love even more is a character that isn’t saved by anything but their own strength. Morikawa emphasizes training in this series like no other I’ve ever seen. We spend
months with Ippo during his training regimen, which always varies. Coach Kamogawa is old, experienced, and super-innovative to put Ippo in the best condition for his fights. One fight may require leg strength, the next building a stronger, thicker neck to withstand punches from an opponent coming down from a higher weight class. Lemme tell you like Coach Kamogawa told Ippo: “Not everyone who works hard is rewarded. However! All those who succeed have worked hard!!” Not a damn thing comes easy in life. It’s all about that training on training on training, boi. Much like in life, in a fight there are no guarantees things will go your way. However, the more prepared you are for what’s to come, the better your odds.
Morikawa literally shows us this in each fighter’s training regimen. He stresses the particular muscles that develop on each page, along with the effect of their developing. It’s all cause and effect with intricate visual detail. There’s no Senzu Bean, Hidden Trap card, or forbidden jutsu that’ll make it a short or easy fight. Just a Gold’s Gym membership being put to use and that’s what the fuck I’m here for. Ippo follows Coach Kamogawa’s instructions as if they were commandments. That shit is law to him. Kamogawa made Ippo’s in-fighting approach and Peek-a-Boo style his best weapon. The trust that buds between Kamogawa and Ippo is one of the relationships in Hajime no Ippo that separates the series from its contemporaries. The bond between the trainer and his pupil. Ippo will always do everything in his power in the ring to show his appreciation for the time and belief Kamogawa (and others) entrusts to him.
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