Slam Dunk vol. 12

The last time I talked about this series, I said that it hadn’t become the great Shonen Jump title that everyone else said it was.  Since then, it has made some great strides in that direction.  Thug turned basketball man  Sakuragi Hanamichi will never stop being an idiot, but his self-proclaimed genius as an athlete is slowly becoming evident.  It’s the skill with which mangaka Takehiko Inoue depicts Sakuragi’s drive to overcome his weaknesses and his team’s desire to overcome their opponents and make it to the nationals that make this title well worth reading now.

It’s in this volume that we see them up against their greatest challenge so far:  Kainan.  This high school has made it to the nationals 16 years in a row and everyone expects them to do the same this year.  However, team captain Akagi is determined to end their streak here and we get to see that his ambition is not without credibility.  The on-the-court action is rendered as skillfully as ever by Inoue, and he also manages the neat trick of humbling Sakuragi in an interesting way (he may be able to step up his game against better players, but not so much when he’s faced with players who are slightly worse than he is).  It took a while for this series to really get going, but now I can see what everyone was talking about — this really is Shonen Jump at its best.