Today, March 17, is the anniversary of Japan’s first weekly manga, Shukan Shonen Magazine. Launched in 1959 and published each Wednesday, the book kicked off the trend of serialized comics for boys, and spawned stories such as Shuichi Shigeno’s Bari Bari Densetsu. The format would be copied by other magazines, which led to seminal works like Initial D,Wangan Midnight, Circuit Wolf and more. These tales would go on to influence generations of car enthusiasts around the world.
What’s your favorite automotive manga or comic?
The most entertaining comment by next week will receive a prize. Scroll down to see the winner of last week’s QotW, “How did you learn about cars?“.
Every hero has an origin story, and once again we were floored by the wide range of beginnings of our impressively knowledgable readers. For many, like Kyuusha Corner or StreetSpirit, it was good ol’ dad that passed on mechanical knowledge. Either that or, as in the case of Curtis or Negishi no Keibajo, it was another family member or neighbor.
For others, like Michael Jue or ManifoldDestiny, it was simply opportunity or genetics that pushed an inquisitive mind toward an auto shop class. Many, like エーイダン, or Fred Langille, got their starts with toys, model kits, books and games, or perhaps like BlitzPig just had a knack for taking things apart to see how they worked.
Some, like Geoff, or TheJWT, just dove in with real cars because parts cars were cheap or because they owned obscure cars that shops weren’t willing to work on. Or, like Taylor C., they took it upon themselves to maintain their family cars, or simply learned what they needed to via YouTube like Franxou.
Of course we are tempted to award the prize to anyone who cited the JNC website itself as inspiration, like Lupus, but we must maintain neutrality. That’s why this week’s winner is Banzai, whose tale beginning with Matchbox cars was just too heartwarming.
I suppose it began in a dirt patch under a tree in our front yard. My friend from across the street and I could spend hours on end with our Matchbox cars running around made up tracks in that dirt. Later, it turned to Hot Wheels on plastic tracks, push button starts with loop de loops and a flag dropping on the winner at the finish.
My natural progression took me to AFX cars and building models. Still remember covering the ping pong table with old blankets and stuffing tee shirts and towels underneath to create mountains and elevation changes for the slot car tracks.
Then there was seeing the movie Grand Prix for the 1st time. I would venture to bet, that movie ignited more passion for cars in young imaginations anyone could ever count. But to this day, I believe it all started in that simple dirt patch, outside, under the tree.
Omedetou, your comment has earned you a set of decals from the JNC Shop!
As an aside, Initial D was the first manga I ever saw that hadn’t been thoroughly de-Japanified and it must’ve been tempting for the publishers (put the pages of panels on transparency and flip them to read right-to-left as had been the ’80s norm, and get the “bonus” of all the cars being left-hand drive…now to hand cut-out and reflip all the pedal boxes so they don’t have the clutch on the right and gas on the left…oh, and explain away the lack of Camaros, Mustangs and other Detroit iron…)
CARtoons!!
Krass and Bernie – it’s what we grew up with here!!
251 Restore Garage.
so many retro cars, the story itself very fresh, with grains of moral wisdom inside every chapter of the story.
agree with this. drawing is pretty accurate too
Any idea where to find an English translation? Looks amazing.
I’m not sure if it’s my favourite, as I haven’t checked it out in forever, but Gunsmith Cats is certainly the one that I recall first whenever someone mentions anime and cars in the same sentence. A distant second place would probably be Wangan Midnight.
I gotta go for ‘Shakotan Boogie!’, alongside ‘shonan junai gumi’ and ‘Kyou kara ore wa!!’ (which are more ‘delinquent lifestyle’ than car-related) these were my favorites during high school, shenannigans, friends and trying to look real cool (and failing miserably to impress the ladies)!
I even went so far as to do essays on kaido racers and bosozoku for social studies!
I would choose “CHARGER500”, even though it is probably little known outside of Japan.
To put it simply, this manga is like a Japanese version of the French film “TAXI”.
The main character is a female taxi driver with excellent driving techniques, who drives a Skyline R31/R32 taxi, equipped with a fictional V8 twin engine developed by Nissan’s Skunk Works.
As a side job, she works as an underground driver, taking on any request and transporting all kinds of people and goods at super high speeds, in exchange for the high fee of “5 million yen per trip”.
The crazy car action of her and her Skyline is of course fascinating, but what I love about this manga are the episodes about specific brands and cars that are regularly depicted in the manga.
Skyline fans want revenge for the showdown between Skyline and the Porsche 908 at the Japanese Grand Prix, so they close down the streets to race the R32 and Porsche 959.
Mazda’s rotary development team, hoping to prove that their technology can compete in F1, rents out the Suzuka Circuit to challenge the pole position time in F1.
A street racer, who sees himself in the AE86, a car that will one day be forgotten by the public, and spends his days street racing with the AE86 to deny his own miserable reality.
*Note: This manga was released before Initial D and the AE86 was not yet as popular as it is today.
In this way, this manga contains various episodes related to one car, and these episodes depict the passion and feelings people have for each car.
What I love most about it is that it always portrays these people’s passion as irrational and foolish. They themselves understand that, but still can’t stop loving their beloved car. That’s why I empathize with these people, and I really, really love this manga.
Porsche 908 is a typo of Porsche 904, sorry.
The 1st car-manga i’ve faced was Initial D. It opened me to this genre. I’ve found Shakotan Boogie, Over_Rev, Circuit Wolf… But my absolute favorite is Wangan MidNight.
It has it’s own, specific vibe that is nowhere else to find. This vibe is built from several aspects.
First and foremost the way the Night is shown. Since most of the races and a lot of personal story’s take place in night time Kusunoki Michiharu needed to convince the reader that it’s dark. The way it is executed is very subtele, elegant. It’s not done by obvious black background, but rather by light’s play, some blur of shiny coronas of lamp posts and car headlamps.
Second factor is the way the cars are drawn. At the beginning they look kinda caricaturized, with disproportioned body’s, too short & too wide, with exessive cambers. It’s the style straight from Shakotan Boogie. And i’ve loved it. Today’s HotWheels “Tooned” lineup is proabobly taken directly from this drawing style. But as the story runs the cars become more detailed, And towards the ending arc’s they become somewaht simplified, because proabobly the reader knows exacly what they are.
There is also a lot of technicalitys in this manga. Detalied descriprions of mechanics, tunning, driving techniques etc, witch give the story a real-life, scinetific background.
Also the time setting. It’s a bit debbatable when exactly this story takes place and what time frame it spans. One major hint is the R34 GT-R, witch is presented as a “New Car” by Yamamoto in the early chapters, so it might be around 1999. So the pinnacle of tuning era.
The way the cars are modded also suits my taste a lot. Tunned to the max in terms of performance, but with minimal visual changes. The ultimate “Gran Turismo Tuning Style”.
And lastly, the story itself is very much like my own. I’ve also found a car that no one wanted, and that car possed me. Of course it’s not a expressway beast like Akuma no Zetto, but it defined my way of living for a long time. All my actions and living decissions revolved around my car, just like Akio did for his Z. So i indentify with the main character to the core.
I would’ve gone with Shakotan Boogie, but I’ve only read the first chapter (it was the only one someone translated online) and watched the OVA. That, and after I found Over-Rev! It would’ve been no contest.
I first came across it by a translated page of it that popped up somewhere. I want to say a discord server I was on. No idea why it came up. But, I do know it was from the first volume…upon further review, it was from volume 2. But here was this anime girl, and her boy friend (this turned out being her friend Touru) eating some food and riding around in an MR2! I says to myself, “I gotta know more! What’s this from?”
So, I start reverse-image searching on the internet, seeing if any other pages might have it.
I don’t remember how many different searches I tired, but I think the one that popped something went something like “Ryoko MR2” or “Anime girl driving an MR2”.
Eventually I found a manga site that had the series to read and just fell right into this story of a young girl, fresh out of high school who gets into touge racing with some locals and makes friends with some other female hashiriya and forming their own group.