Dogsred vol. 1

You’re Satoru Noda.  You’ve just completed your magnum opus “Golden Kamuy” after 31 volumes.  It’s been a bestseller, placed on multiple “best of” lists, and been adapted in an anime and live action as well.  What do you do in order to follow up on that level of success?  If you’re Satoru Noda then you’re going to use all that juice to relaunch the hockey manga you did that bombed right before you hit it big.  And if you’re me, then you’re going to read it even if you’ve never been a big sports manga fan to begin with.

Rou Shirakawa is in his third year of middle school, but he’s already a star on the junior figure skating championship circuit.  Even as he grieves the recent loss of his mother, he crushes his latest competition, stunning his fans, the audience, and the judges all at once.  Then he perpetrates a shocking breach of etiquette that gets him kicked out of the sport and forces him and his sister to go live with their grandfather in Hokkaido.

Even as Rou gains the nickname the “Rabid Prince” for his actions he still wants to skate.  Yet when he tries to do so at a frozen pond nearby, he incurs the wrath of Keiichi Genma who plays for a hotshot middle school team.  While their roughhousing shows that Rou can hold his own against a seasoned hockey player, it also causes the practice goal to sink through the ice.  Now Rou is on the hook for finding a replacement and it turns out that the easiest way for him to do it is to join the other, sad-sack junior high team in a match against Keiichi’s.

So what we have here is a Talented but Cocky Outsider who is Forced to Play a Game He Doesn’t Like.  He Doesn’t Know a Thing About It but he has some Unique Skills that allow him to succeed in his own way.  Meanwhile, the Rival Teams have a History of Bad Blood and are looking to settle things with One Big Game.  Yet it’s the Cocky Outsider and his Unique Skills that make the difference and allow them to Win Triumph Succeed Eke Out a Moral Victory Against the Odds.

In case that wasn’t clear, this first volume of “Dogsred” is filled to the brim with tropes relating to the sports genre.  It makes for an utterly predictable read even if ice hockey hasn’t really come up as a featured sport all that often in manga.  Rou’s arc, and the arcs of all the other characters introduced here, is immediate from the start and you won’t be surprised at all to see how it plays out here.  This first volume makes it clear that if you’re going to start reading “Dogsred,” it’s not going to be for its unpredictable, genre-busting storytelling.

No, if you continue reading this series after vol. 1, it’s going to be because Noda does his absolute damndest to make these tropes and cliches as exciting as he possibly can.  We only get to see a bit of Rou’s figure-skating career, but that bit is electric and it’s easy to see how he came to dominate in it.  From there, we’re shown how he uses those skills to compete in unorthodox ways with Keiichi and his teammates while also coming off as a real dork in the process.

That’s because Rou is not only filled with the kind of arrogance you see in people who are really good at something, but he’s a very fussy and clueless person in general.  Angry cats freak him out.  He’s relieved to know there aren’t any cockroaches in his new town.  The rules of hockey are completely foreign to him and he gets put in the penalty box multiple times for things like high-sticking and puck grabbing.  Yet his skills allow him to fuse that arrogance into determination and a passion to learn from his mistakes, while also adapting on the fly to the many challenges presented to him in this game.

Rou is clearly the most fully-formed character in this volume, but the remaining members of the cast are at least likably familiar.  Keiichi fulfills the hotheaded upstart role.  The coach of the high school team gives off real mad dog eccentricity.  Young starter Kosugi’s world-weariness makes an impression even though he’s a dead ringer for “Kamuy’s” shit-for-luck Abashiri Prison guard Toshiyuki Kadokura.  There are also plenty of characters who are just there for a gag, like the earnest young glasses-wearing girl who solemnly remarks that, when Rou’s skating, “His every move emanates a sense of tragedy!”

There are parts of “Dogsred” that are played for drama, but most of it is just goofy sports-action fun.  While I loved the over-the-top comic setpieces that “Kamuy” would throw up as it went on, we don’t get to see that here.  Everything here feels scaled-back and that’s probably for the best given the small-town setting.  That said, there are signs around town warning people about bears, so I figure it’s only a matter of time before one finds its way into the story.

It’s also only a matter of time before Noda reveals why Rou did what he did to get kicked out of figure skating.  While setting up a mystery from the start of the series isn’t new, Noda does it really abruptly here.  To the point where it feels like he’s screaming at the reader, “HEY!  HERE’S A MYSTERY FOR YOU!  DON’T YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT’S UP WITH ROU?  THEN YOU’D BETTER KEEP READING!”  It all feels more annoying than enticing at this point, particularly since it doesn’t come off as much of a mystery and would only need Rou to sit down for less than five minutes to explain it.

I’m going to find out what it is, though, because I’m going to keep reading.  Yes, the story in this first volume is as predictable as it gets, but it’s executed with such style and energy that I’m not bothered by it.  I can’t see this having the same scope and impact of Noda’s signature series and that was always going to be a tough act to follow.  I don’t mind as this first volume of “Dogsred” still left me fully invested with seeing where its protagonist is going to go in his new home and sport of choice.