Hello Mangasplaining fans, have we got a treat for you! Thanks to our friends at Kodansha who sponsored this episode, we were given an advance peek at the forthcoming hardcover omnibus Ashita no Joe: Fighting for Tomorrow Volume 1.

This classic boxing manga (and so much more!) has been one of the podcast’s white whales for years, and on December 24, the first volume will be released to the world! Is it everything we’ve dreamed of? Listen and find out!

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Ashita no Joe: Fighting for Tomorrow Volume 1
Written by Asao Takamori
Art by Tetsuya Chiba
Translated by Asa Yoneda
Edited by Daniel Joseph
Production by Risa Cho and Pei Ann Yeap
Lettered by Evan Hayden
Proofreading by Kevin Luo

Published by Kodansha Inc. (Print/Digital)

Read the complete first chapter for free at Kodansha.us!

Audio editing by David Brothers. Show notes by Christopher Woodrow-Butcher and Deb Aoki

Before We Get Started, This is a Sponsored Episode:

Hi all, Christopher here. Long-time listeners of Mangasplaining will know that Ashita no Joe, alongside fellow boxing manga Hajime no Ippoand fighting manga Baki The Grappler are sort of our white-whales–of-manga, titles that we have hoped since the inception of the podcast to be able to read and to cover. [NOTE: We did discuss New Grappler Baki back in Episode 90, tho that’s not the first Baki series. Go listen to that episode to get the backstory on that!]

When Kodansha announced that they had secured the license for Ashita no Joe, we were thrilled! When they reached out to us and asked if they could sponsor this episode of Mangasplaining in order to get our episode out into the world closer to its December 24th, 2024 release date? That was an easy “Yes” from the whole team. So yeah, sponsored episode! They sent us all books too, which is nice. Take everything we say with as many grains of salt as you need to, but we first talked about this title on episode 12, we really have been waiting for it for a long time. Let’s see if it lives up to its legend!

Also, because this was based on a pre-release edition of the book, we got some stuff wrong about what the final book actually looks like and how it’s formatted, and we couldn’t exactly edit it out because of how it appears in the episode. So, for the record:

Ashita No Joe is a 6.25” x 8.25” hardcover weighing in at 580 pages. It collects material from the first 3 (of 20) volumes of Ashita no Joe. It is US$59.99 for the hardcover edition, and US$19.99 for the digital edition. Digital and print are both released in English on December 24th, 2024. Visit kodansha.us for buying options.

Thank you to Kodansha for providing copies of the book, and their support of the podcast!

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About Ashita no Joe: Fighting for Tomorrow:

Kodansha has this to say about Ashita no Joe, from the book’s back-cover copy.

WE ALL NEED SOMETHING TO FIGHT FOR!

A young street-fighting drifter named Joe Yabuki wanders aimlessly through the slums of Tokyo, but a chance encounter with a failed boxer who sees something special in the boy sparks a partnership that might just take Joe all the way to the top …

This universally acclaimed classic is much more than a sports manga: it is a cultural touchstone and a realistic masterpiece, perhaps the most prominent series ever to eschew any hint of the superhuman or supernatural, yielding a keenly observed human drama that captured the hearts of an entire generation on its way to becoming a runaway bestseller. Serialized from 1968-1973, Ashita no Joe made a particular impact on college students and the working class, who saw their own experience reflected in Joe’s struggle. To this day, it remains one of the most important manga ever published, and this landmark omnibus edition marks its first appearance in English translation.

Hitmaker Asao Takamori was arguably the biggest manga author of his day, while Tetsuya Chiba, winner of innumerable awards, remains one of the most influential manga artists of all time.

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SPOILERS for this episode: We thoroughly spoil the first volume, but don’t talk about the bigger plot points for the series.

1:30 Ashita no Joe originally ran from 1968 to 1973 in Kodansha’s Weekly Shonen Magazine, and has been compiled into 20 volumes. Launched as a weekly magazine by Kodansha in 1959, Weekly Shonen Magazine is generally regarded in Japan as a bit edgier, and a bit weirder, than Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump, which debuted almost a decade later, in 1968. Reading this series, I can believe the “Weekly Shonen is weirder” rep.

This edition of Ashita no Joe is taken from the kanzenban or “high grade” edition, as Kodansha calls it, which runs 8 volumes. So about 2.5 volumes of content are in each volume, though from what I can tell from the Kodansha USA edition, their volume 1 contains almost the first 3 volumes of the original Japanese series. This may seem like a lot, but this series is a real page-turner, and I could see myself getting to the end of it no problem.

02:22 It’s hard to overstate just how culturally relevant Ashita no Joe is in Japan, and moreover for a 60+ year old property, how much it remains relevant. While manga that’s even remotely popular rarely stays out of print for long in Japan (and the rich depth of user book stores ensures most tankobon remain relatively easy to find…), Ashita no Joe has enjoyed being thoroughly in print (with a small blip…) since it was released, including in multiple editions at various levels of luxuriousness and affordability. Moreover, as David and Deb point out, the story is constantly the subject of revivals and adaptations, in animated TV series’, animated films, live action films, and so much more.

We should also note that the Ashita no Joe anime actually aired on TV in the Spanish-speaking world in the 1970s, so Joe, aka “Rocky Joe,” is actually a beloved character around the world. David even picked up the really nice upscale Spanish release of volume 1 a couple years back, before this edition was announced.

[DEB:] The original “Tomorrow’s Joe” animated series is streaming (legally! officially! with English subs!) on TMS’s YouTube channel. Go watch an episode or two, for even more of that Showa-era fighting drama flavor.

But all of that is a drop in the bucket compared to Joe’s continued physical presence in Japan. This iconic illustration of Joe featured heavily in a Uniqlo t-shirt line (and a whole specialty line of shirts featuring the character), and also can be found as statues dotted across the bars of drinking areas across the country.

[DEB:] The scene of Joe bowing his head with a faint smile after a fateful match is so iconic, it’s often seen as a visual meme in webtoons and manga — symbolizing a moment when a character is just so worn out by circumstances, absurdity of the plot, work burnout, you name it. Here’s one that I’ve saved in my webtoon memes album.

[DEB:] Also, I got to see the actual original manga page from this scene from Ashita no Joe at the British Museum’s Manga exhibit back in 2018, and was surprised to see that it was torn and a bit raggedy around the edges. For such a major artifact of manga history to be found in this condition was… well, it was humbling, that’s for sure.

02:45 We’ve only lightly touched on the Japanese student movement in the 1960s and 1970s here on the podcast, but it was a time of incredible social change. Ashita no Joe, with its story of a plucky underdog fighting against an obviously corrupt and unequal system, was a touchstone work for both young people and college age readers at the time. It really was a counter-cultural manga, not unlike Marvel Comics in the 1960s (and Chip mentions in a moment) but far more radical in my opinion. It, alongside Sanpei Shirato’s even more radical Legend of Kamui, were what the cool kids (Mishima!?) were reading when they were reading manga.

[DEB:] Coincidentally, the first volume of Legend of Kamui is available now from Drawn & Quarterly. I have a feeling we’ll be talking about this one very soon too.

Someone better-read than me could probably draw a line between the two titles, where the writers of both titles obscured the anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian natures of them with euphemistic dressing, like historical ninja fiction or the very specific language of plucky shonen comics. Maybe throw Barefoot Gen in there too…

REF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968%E2%80%931969_Japanese_university_protests

Also worth noting that the only time I’ve seen the student movement and protests depicted in print is in Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Drifting Life, which is sadly between printings right now. But if you can find a copy, grab one. 🙂

Oh, just noticed a little something for the counterculture. On page 180, Joe specifically references the actor/comedian/singer Hitoshi Ueki (1927-2007), with his song “Mr. Irresponsible” from a similarly named film from 1962.

Hitoshi Ueki was in Kurosawa’s Ran, he was a big hit actor in his day. It’s interesting to see this very specific reference to an actor and song from a time and place make an appearance. The song is fantastic too, it sounds like cinematic music from the time:

4:30 Yeah, sorry I was indelicate here, but wow, this character. Shonen manga has a history of introducing female characters to be hated by the primarily boy-focused readership, and whoo-boy, is the introduction of Yoko Shiraki at the beginning of volume 2 (page 227) a great example of that. Smiling while she says he’ll be sent to the reformatory, unnerving Joe in the courtroom, and then all of the… bits… where she whips an old man until he bleeds (more on that later). She is not… very likeable at this point of the story. We find out more about her towards the end of this first volume.

6:30 Yes, it’s true, boxing prodigy and very muscled Joe is only 15 years old! Just a little older than the average readers of Weekly Shonen (typically boys, age 9-13), teenage Joe is framed as an aspirational figure for readers. It kind of does and doesn’t come across in this book. Being 15 used to be a lot older than it is now.

8:13 I think Deb’s points are really salient, people today have very fixed ideas of what Japan is like. It’s only a much older generation that thinks of (or knows) Japan as something other than the gleaming technological future (and vacation destination for most of the world…) that it is today. Things weren’t great after the war for most Japanese people, for at least 30 years after the war ended, and even after the American Occupation of Japan ended in 1952. The post-war rebuilding went on for a long, long time. While Japan undeniably rapidly transformed into a modern, industrialized society, the post-war economic miracle definitely missed a few people, and we see them in this book.

[DEB:} On a recent trip to Japan, I picked up this interesting book —”Tomorrow’s Joe Holy Land Book” ( Japanese title あしたのお嬢 ~あしたのジョー 聖地巡り~ if you want to order it from your favorite Japanese bookseller). It’s a manga starring the characters of Ashita no Joe taking a modern day girl on a tour of the real places depicted in the manga series, showing how they looked then and how they look today. It’s only in Japanese, but if you’re a fan of manga history, go check it out.

10:04 We should probably talk a little bit about Tetsuya Chiba and Asao Takamori a.k.a. Ikki Kajiwara here, as creators of this book.

First up, Asao Takamori (1936-1987) is actually Asaki Takamori, with Asao one of his pen names. His other, and the one for which he is much more popularly known (including being referenced by Deb here) is Ikki Kajiwara, due to writing for rival magazines at the same time(!).

A writer and film producer, Kajiwara is probably the most popular sports-manga author of the Showa era, between his work here on Ashita no Joe, as well as the genre-defining baseball manga Star of the Giants (Kyojin no Hoshi) with Noboru Kawasaki, and wrestling manga Tiger Mask with Junichi Miyata, not to mention popular judo and karate manga, two disciplines for which he received black belts himself.

Of course, like Ashita no Joe none of those titles have never been formally translated into English, nor has the rest of Takamori’s oeuvre. It’s hard to overstate, but no one who has done a boxing, wrestling, or baseball manga since the 1960s has done it without being in the shadow of Takamori, aka Kajiwara.

Takamori’s personal life was also fascinating and sketchy, with his Japanese Wikipedia entry describing him as having “an unconventional and bold lifestyle” and “numerous scandals.” If you look at that picture up top I think you’ll put together what that means. In 1975 he formed a film production company, and spent much of the end of his life working as a film producer, working on adaptations of his own manga, documentaries, and literary works. He even worked with Seijun Suzuki on “A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness.” The scandals he was involved with (seriously, read his Japanese Wiki page, it’s insane) led to a sort of 1970s and 1980s style shadow-banning of him and his work, not to mention jail-time, with many of his titles removed from print and sale due to moral panic. He’s subsequently been “re-evaluated” by artistic society, and his work is once again held in the esteem it previously enjoyed.

But really, check out this trailer for “A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness,” by David’s recent fav Seijun Suzuki, it’s absolutely wild.

Moving on, Takamori’s collaborator on Ashita no Joe, Tetsuya Chiba (1939-), is no less a legend of manga creation. While Ashita no Joe is easily the most important manga of his career, Chiba has remained a prolific creator for decades, with a number of hits under his belt including the incredible sumo wrestling manga Notari Matsutaro. Chiba is still with us today, and in addition to being the first artist to ever be nominated as a member to the Japan Art Academy (alongside Yoshiharu Tsuge), Chiba has also received the Japanese Order of Culture (the first manga artist to receive the honor) this year in 2024.

Chiba is interesting because for much of his career, he created both shonen and shojo manga simultaneously. In fact, in 2016 he undertook a crowdfunding effort to turn one of his 1960s shojo one shots, Kaze no Yo ni, into an animated film. It was successful, and you can see the Japanese language trailer here, complete with some familiar character designs.

Chiba is also fascinating because like Asao, his shadow looms large over sports manga. His work includes not just boxing and sumo stories, but he also worked with Asao on the Young Giants spin-off of Star of the Giants baseball manga, alongside sports titles themed with tennis, golf, soccer, karate, and a variety of romance stories, war stories, coming of age stories, and more. His current works (he’s still work at 85 years old!) are autobiographical, short stories (published in full color!) about his early life, time during the war, his time as a manga creator, really its the kind of career we don’t see a lot of in North America.

While these stories have been translated into many languages so far, no one has been willing or able to pick up the English license as of yet. It’s a shame too, because they’re really good and interesting gentle historical manga. Maybe the publication of Ashita no Joe will get the ball rolling!

10:12 It’s kind of wild to think about, but as we mentioned on our Manga! Manga! Episode, It’s true, it’s been 40 years since the very first readers (in English) of Manga! Manga! got their first taste of Ashita no Joe. And that was nearly 20 years after the series started serializing! You coulda learned Japanese in all that time and read it in the original language…!

11:17 Actually at 582 pages, it’s almost 3 volumes.

14:17 One of the best gags of the book is Joe staging a fake photo shoot after robbing a pachinko (gambling) parlour, with photographers to show he’s “Looking out for our most vulnerable children” to build his image. This spurs a massive donation of money to him for his “work.” If that’s not a clear shot at the hypocrisy of the ruling class, I don’t know what is.

16:31 In addition to the direct anime adaptations of Ashita no Joe we mentioned above, there was this very well-received anime reimagining of the series, Megalobox. That first line in the trailer is killer too, with “There’s no tomorrow for folks like us.” which is… the antithesis of today’s manga. David vouches for this one being good, I’d check it out! It looks good.

As Deb mentions (and handily posted on Twitter!), the Megalobox anime features a cameo between Ashita no Joe’s creators Takamori (as he looked at the end of his life) and Chiba (as he looks today).

19:15 So yeah, the classic manga trope of the “bancho,” the wandering schoolyard brawler who’s huge, with wrapped ribs, and a piece of tall grass in his mouth. Rikishi’s appearance later in the manga is foreshadowed in the color section at the front of this book, and he fits the stereotype almost to a tee. There’s actually great gags about bancho in both Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga (which we read a while back) and in Usamaru Furuya’s Short Cuts, which, spoiler, we will read later this season.

P.S. Rikiishi are also what sumo wrestlers are called in Japan, with a direct translation being “powerful warrior.” So, uh, a little extra nudge for the Japanese readers there, that this dude will be powerful and important.

20:15 Former Marvel comics editor in chief Jim Shooter coined the phrase “Every comic is someone’s first.” This is both technically true and responsible for the Marvel comics style in the 1980s that saw characters needing to be introduced by name the first time they showed up in an issue, the necessity of one-issue stories (or two if you got really lucky). This credo sort of defined Western comics storytelling for a few decades.

Long serialized manga like Ashita no Joe featured a similar situation, with main characters either needing that same periodic reintroduction by name, or needing to be generic enough that your average reader could figure out what their deal was pretty quick without it. Deb’s anecdote about Korean webtoons is also pretty interesting too. Looks like that editorial advice is truly international.

22:18 I’m old and I’ve been on the internet a long time, so you’ll need to trust me when I tell you that John Byrne hated Ultimate Spider-Man because of the decompressed storytelling, because I looked and I can’t find a link to his complaints at the time.

22:47 We really liked the fact that, despite splitting Joe and his coach apart with the prison (“juvenile hall”) sentence, Danpei is still coaching him, sending him postcards explaining boxing!

Rikishi’s a dick.

23:00 Deb references All-Rounder Meguru, another Kodansha title that takes a more academic, explainer-vibe to fight manga. We read that one too and had some pretty different takes on it. You can check out our episode on it here:

23:31 The overall storytelling of this book is very different than most titles we’ve read, though obviously its got something in common with other classic titles like those of Mitsuru Adachi, Osamu Tezuka and Shotaro Ishinomori that we’ve enjoyed. But yeah, LOTS of very dense pages, like this 8-panel layout on page 239:

I’m actually kind of shocked that it doesn’t seem more crowded than it is.

24:14 So who influences who?

Like this is maybe outside the scope of these show notes, but at least in comics I’ve noticed that there’s the people who make the big splash, the people that can’t help but be influenced by them (or are ordered by their editors to make their work look like the big-splash for commercial reasons).

Then after a while, there’s the people who are consciously trying to subvert that art (but reaction is still influence). Eventually, you get artists coming in for whom the big-splash is just one of dozens of artistic influences on them from across their instruction. So you have someone like Chiba who is a direct descendent of the work of Osamu Tezuka (debuted in 1947). When Chiba debuts in 1958, and while he’s pulling in other influences, the similarities are undeniable. No shame no shade.

Actually, here’s another cover from Weekly Shonen Magazine, courtesy of Deb.

This magazine features many of the creators working in and serialized in the magazine at the time, including Tetsuya Chiba… and Osamu Tezuka! You get a sense of who knew who, who was hanging out with whom, etc., and it’s a hell of a photo.

Deb helpfully created a massive twitter thread that identifies all of the people on this cover and their work, and you can check it out here: https://x.com/debaoki/status/1490709993267478528

So that covers some of the “bullpen” type influence. For our superhero fans, it’s a bit like how John Buscema literally drew “How to Draw Comics The Marvel Way” and so every young artist who came after him at Marvel (and a few before) have Buscema in their artistic DNA.

Meanwhile, with characters like Pinoko (from Black Jack by Tezuka), and the little girl in the gang of street youth here, they both come from a baby-girl trope that was prevalent in shonen manga (sort of a caricature of a girl for boy readers), although Pinoko became weirdly popular for some reason I cannot fathom. There’s like Pinoko merch, it’s utterly bizarre. Anyway, you can check out Black Jack in digital editions (volumes 1-3 are still in print) from Kodansha, I think Pinoko debuts in volume 3.

https://kodansha.us/series/black-jack

26:37 Meanwhile, Cross Game author Mitsuru Adachi was BORN in 1951, and wouldn’t make his debut until 1970. He’s clearly working in the world and the rules established by Tezuka and his contemporaries, but there’s definitely different qualities to his work, with softer and slightly more sophisticated character designs, more filmic (rather than animated) storytelling, and slightly subtler stories. But you can still see the bones, for sure. Go listen to our episode on Cross Game and then buy whatever you can find, it’s such a good series.

For the close readers of the show notes though, I’d love to hear about manga artists who you think bucked the trend of the visual and storytelling style that Tezuka established, post-war. Is it just the Gekiga artists? Would love to read your thoughts.

27:49 We wrote all about the famous manga creator rooming-house Tokiwa-so, as its been recreated as a museum! Read about it here:

31:30

“If you’re on Team ACAB, this is the book for you.”
– Chip Zdarsky, Mangasplaining

34:40 Rikishi, the “powerful warrior” is massive, a teenager, and larger and stronger than any adult in the story… so far. Especially the roly-poly keystone cops portrayed in the same chapters.

35:11 I was laughing out loud on an airplane, reading this scene. Rikishi punching bulls to knock them unconscious, after having them angered and sent directly towards him. Like, talk about shonen power inflation! First pigs…

…and then bulls!

35:45 In case we don’t get to it elsewhere in the episode or in the show-notes, Ashita no Joe actually IS a funny manga too, alongside all of the melodrama. Here’s Joe riding a pig for example, which should be your new phone lock-screen.

36:25 This series is very much a fantasy of what it’s like to be a street tough, out on your own, using your fists to survive. While I have literally no doubt that writer Takamori experienced first-hand much of what’s depicted happening to Joe, the series does get farther and farther from objective reality as it goes on. I mean this shot of the “Special Reformatory” for teenaged boys is straight outta Looney Tunes, you know? But wow, as a kid reading this in Weekly Shonen, it probably would’ve been TERRIFYING.

…and then they whip a guy until he bleeds at the direction of the only female character to show how cruel she is!

I think Chip’s reading is… interesting, but… I ultimately disagree.

40:00 That said, Chip’s favourite two quotes of the book are both top notch:

“Let’s see what your balls are made of!”

“I’m head over heels for those two arms of yours!”

41:15 All the shojo boys’ boarding school manga from the 70s REALLY set the record ‘straight’ on what’s going on in those reformatories, in addition to the, you know, physical violence. You should check out Moto Hagio’s Heart of Thomas for more on that. Maybe one day Keiko Takemiya’s Song of Wind and Trees will also be publishing in English.

[DEB: Song of the Wind and Trees is, however, available in Italian. If you’re dying to read this one, that might be your next best bet.]

That said, there are certain sequences in the book that can be, ah, read into as one likes.

And the lusting by certain members of the reform school prisoners over Yoko are… prurient?

42:00 And now it’s time for Little Brothers, a.k.a. Sweat the Small Stuff, where David points out the little details in the book that he loved. First up, David mentions this really excellent bit of comics, where the light goes out and we just get the lightbulb’s silhouette. It’s really striking, as is this entire sequence when the light comes back on. Putting that beat-down in the dark makes it seem much more violent than the other fights in the book, even with though the speech balloons soften it considerably, and is probably closer to what things were like in actual juvenile hall.

Chilling stuff.

His second favourite bit is another great gag, when the boxing match is about to break out and a kid dressed as a referee stands up and asks if HE can be the referee.

42:50 Chip’s very-own “Little Brothers” moment is on page 448… the tension of the preceding scene and the almost-fight and calling out Yoko and all of it is broken by one of the cops needing to take a leak in the bottom-right corner of the page.

Probably where the original chapter ended, on a gag. Then on page 449, which feels like it was inserted to smooth the continuity out a little bit, we get the panel at the top, linking the continuity between the two and adding a little puddle.

43:50 And then, as promised, there’s the whole fart breakdown.

I think we covered this, but I do think since I’m doing show notes anyway that it’s important to note that comics like this, ostensibly more than a little too mature for their age-range along certain vectors, would frequently include gags and jokes and toilet humor (often literally this volume, with the farting kids and the peeing cop) to keep the mood light and keep younger readers entertained. They might not get the full weight of Joe accusing Yoko of her deadly snobbery, but a guy who can’t control his bladder like a puppy is something that all ages understand.

This is one of the things, incidentally, that turned Chip off when reading through Tezuka’s Phoenix, the whiplash cartooniness of the moods from serious to silly. It’s just part of the storytelling during this time period, and while traces of this persist, toilet humor tends to be a lot rarer in shonen magazines these days.

44:30 And yeah, this story has almost certainly been re-edited from how it was originally serialized, with only a few hints to the book’s weekly chapter breaks and edited-for-the-trade pages still remaining. For example, you can see the slight differences in the peeing panels above, the ropes on top of the truck cab and the shading are completely different. And then earlier in the books, you can see pages 213 and page 214 repeating those two panels with significant differences as they likely closed the story one week, begun it again the next.

When it comes to breaks between volumes of the book, pages 224 to 225 also pretty clearly show the end of volume 1 of the manga, and the beginning of volume 2.

This is a bit like when we were reading the early volumes of AKIRA, and discovering just how much had been changed between the original printing and the version we got in North America. Where the chapter breaks went, what was changed, added, edited, removed. When looking at a classic manga, it’s really interesting to see how the version we hold in our hands came to be.

Of course, given the popularity of this series, a lot of this “sleuthing” has already been done by fans in Japan. I came across this fan-site of Ashita no Joe while working on the show notes here, and its really interesting. Highly recommend you check it out if this kind of thing is your bag, particularly this chapter-by-chapter breakdown page.

Incidentally, AKIRA fans in Japan are getting to discover the behind-the-scenes of that series now, as the recently-released OTOMO THE COMPLETE WORKS 12: AKIRA 1 strips out almost all of the corrections, additions, and polish that was added to the AKIRA collected edition, and even restores chapter pages and more. Read all about it at CHRONOTOMO.

I ALMOST bought this in Japan and I’m starting to regret not having done so.

45:23 The Japanese sound effects kick-ass, and I think letterer Evan Hayden did a good job here too. While we’ve shown you a LOT of great examples here, rest assured that there are way more in the book too. But let’s give you one more, this being the sound effects of police sirens wafting in on the wind.

47:30

“For sixty bucks you can’t go wrong!”

Chip Zdarsky, Mangasplaining

49:30 How would you feel reading this in the time it was released, for the first time? We’ll never know, but thinking about the book in this way will help you maybe help you realize just how important this work is.

51:44

“Once a boxer’s in the ring, he’s alone as a man can be.
Let the screaming of your flesh and bone guide you, Joe.
Keep fighting til you’re spitting blood and can’t take another step.
Because the outcome of this first fight will determine your destiny.
It’s a fork in the road to tomorrow.”

– Danpei Tange, Ashita no Joe

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52:35 – THE BREAK

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Shout-outs!

Chip Shouts-Out David Mazzucchelli’s Batman: Year One Artist Edition, a counterpart to Chip & David’s much beloved Daredevil: Born Again Artist Edition. It’s incredibly beautiful, designed by Chip Kidd, and has a great foreword too.

Deb shouts-out a bar, “Bar Lonely” in Shinjuku, Golden Gai. Deb did actually take me there, but unfortunately when we went it was packed to the gills and we couldn’t get in. Tourists in Golden Gai, what are you gonna do except discover other, more secret drinking alleys? Still, this seems like a fun bar.

At this point we get into a fun round about where we talk about what kind of bar we’d open, in the spirit of a Ashita no Joe bar.

Christopher shouts-out Maurice Vellekoop’s graphic novel I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together, which just won the Toronto Book Award, the first graphic novel to do so. Go get it!

David shouts-out the television series THE OLD MAN, season 2 grabbed his attention and didn’t let go.

Finally, after this podcast was completed, we couldn’t stop learning about Ashita no Joe, and Youtube is a TREASURE TROVE of videos of people professing their love for the series and what it all means. Deb particularly enjoyed this video essay and wanted to share it with all of you.

And that’s an episode of Mangasplaining! This episode is also available wherever you get your podcasts, so please subscribe and leave a review, so others can discover our show.

Thanks so much for listening! Please support your local comic and manga specialty shop when purchasing these books, and you can find one near you at comicshoplocator.com. You can also check your local library for print and digital lending options, they have TONS of manga! Finally, thanks to D.A.D.S. for their musical accompaniment for this episode.

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Nobody’s promised tomorrow…