A comiXologist recommends:
Cross Game
by: Eric Arroyo
Cross Game is a coming-of-age story about adolescent romance, baseball, and struggling to discover the potential that other people see in you. Manga-ka Mitsuru Adachi takes a quiet and atmospheric approach to sports manga, avoiding the passionate shouting and white-knuckle suspense of conventional shounen sports manga. The story revolves around the relationship between Ko, son of the sporting goods store owner, and Wakaba and Aoba, the daughters of the batting center manager, who respectively love and resent Ko.
Although it started in 2005, Cross Game exhibits the best of Adachi’s 1970s style. Meticulously rendered environments convey a pastoral and nostalgic tone, and the sensitive art and writing depict the teenage cast in an honest way. Cross Game is full of nuanced characterization, revealing characters’ layers through small, quiet moments that still cut like a knife. As the seasons pass and Ko advances through high school, the status quo shifts in ways that keep the story fresh, seamlessly switching between interpersonal and baseball-related struggles.
I’d love Cross Game for the romantic story on its own, but it even manages to make me care about baseball. Despite being the son of the sporting goods shop owner, Ko doesn’t have a lot of stake in baseball. But Wakaba and Aoba’s passion for the sport infects him, and that passion reaches out to the reader, too. Cross Game effortlessly integrates the strategies and internal politics of high school baseball with the students’ personal lives, making baseball accessible and emotional, even to the layman.
Cross Game is a testament to Adachi’s emotive cartooning, highlighting the most beautiful and human parts of high school and baseball.
If you’re looking for more slow-paced and genuine comics about first love without the baseball, check out Sweet Blue Flowers. And if you’ve got a sports manga itch that you just can’t scratch, give the girls’ lacrosse team in Cross Manage a chance!
[Check out Cross Game on comiXology]
Eric Alexander Arroyo is a Brooklyn-based cartoonist and a Digital Editor at comiXology. He’s probably drawing giant robots and listening to ABBA.