Ep. 120: Dogsred, by Satoru Noda
Back before there was a print edition, the Mangasplainers read the weekly chapters of Golden Kamuy creator Satoru Noda’s new hockey manga, DOGSRED! Christopher hosts for a series he was excited to read, Deb already loved, and David was unsure of… And what about Chip, who “hates hockey?” Is there anything here for HIM? Listen in and read along to find out! (The first three chapters are free to read on VIZ Media Shonen Jump and Shueisha’s Manga Plus sites).
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IN THIS EPISODE
00:00: Dogsred vol. 1
1:04:16: THE BREAK
1:06:00: We’re picking books this week!
Dogsred Volume 1, by Satoru Noda
Translated by John Werry
Lettering by Steve Dutro
Published by VIZ Media. Available in print, ebook, and digital serialization on Shonen Jump and Manga Plus.
Audio editing by David Brothers. Show notes by Christopher Woodrow-Butcher and Deb Aoki
Recorded April 14th, 2024
BEFORE WE GET STARTED
Hello, and welcome back to the podcast! As mentioned last time, we had been recording even while not uploading episodes. We’re a little over a year behind our recording at this point, so a LOT has happened in the world of Dogsred since we talked about it. For one, there’s now almost 50 chapters! But for two, and much more importantly, the book is actually in print now! In fact, the first two volumes are now in print from VIZ Media in English, and available wherever you get your manga! So please take all of that part of this episode with a grain of salt…
That said, the first 3 chapters ARE still available to read for free on Shonen Jump and Manga Plus, so you can check out the links up top too.
Speaking of the chapters, volume 1 of Dogsred contains the first seven chapters of the manga, but we actually read the first 8 chapters for this episode, and Deb and Christopher read way, way ahead. So please consider this episode to have spoilers for at least Dogsred Volumes 1 & 2.
ABOUT SATORU NODA
Satoru Noda was born in Kitahiroshima, Hokkaido, Japan. He’s best known for his manga series Golden Kamuy, recently completed by VIZ Media, adapted into anime and live action films, and a legitimate cultural force in Japan. His great-grandfather was a military settler in Hokkaido and veteran of the Russo-Japanese War. In fact, the protagonist of Golden Kamuy, Sugimoto Saichi, is actually named for his grandfather!
Noda worked as a manga assistant for 10 years before making his debut. He was an assistant to the manga creator Mitsurou Kubo (writer of the hit ice-skating anime Yuri on Ice) creator of the high school cheerleading/time-slip manga Again!!, and the grown-up romantic comedy/drama manga Moteki, both published in English by Kodansha. He also worked as an assistant under the veteran manga creator Yasuyuki Kunimoto, who sadly passed away in 2018.
Noda-sensei doesn’t make many (if any?) public appearances, and it looks like all of the photos of him online are actually of his editor, Ookuma Hakkou, who accepted an award on his behalf one time. Instead, he’ll either draw Sugimoto in his stead, or the serial killer character Henmi from Golden Kamuy volume 4… which is… a choice:
Noda’s full professional debut was with the ice hockey manga Spinamarada!, serialized in Weekly Young Jump, which ran for 7 volumes and is almost guaranteed never to be translated to English. It was considered a commercial failure, sadly. Fun fact that we share later in the episode, the manga is actually about the skating move “Spin-o-rama” and he misheard and titled his series that? Which is amazing?
You can see what a Spin-o-rama is here:
[DEB:] The “Spin-o-rama” move also makes an appearance in Dogred, in Chapter 38.
ABOUT DOGSRED
This brings us to today’s manga, Dogsred, serialized in Young Jump magazine, which is an out-and-out reboot and retooling of the earlier Supinamarada! manga! I don’t think I knew it was a reboot of that series when we recorded this episode. Dogsred started serialization on July 27, 2023, and continues to this day with five volumes released in Japan, and two in North America.
So what is Dogsred? Well I’m glad you asked, here’s how VIZ Media describes the first two volumes:
Volume 1: After winning the national championship, 15-year-old figure skater Rou Shirakawa was on his way to the Olympics. But with his mother’s tragic death on his mind, he threw it all away in an outburst of rage. Banned from figure skating, he and his sister move to Hokkaido. When he meets some local kids at the skating pond, they convince him to be a stand-in player for their soon-to-be-disbanded hockey team. The team has never won a game, and they’re up against the local champs—but if they’ve got to go down, they want to score at least one goal before it’s all over. Rou hasn’t got a clue how to play ice hockey, but he sure knows how to skate!
Volume 2: As the school year comes to a close, it’s time for the powerhouse Oinokami High ice hockey team to win the championship once again, but have they lost their edge? Then, after one of the biggest natural disasters in Japanese history, the people of northern Japan are determined to carry on. When the new school year starts, Rou and his friends from Miyamori enter Oinokami High School. They decide to try out for the hockey team, but before they can join, they have to survive a grueling daylong trial under the eye of the eccentric Coach Nihei.
- VIZ Media
Now let’s get to it!
02:13 – Hi there, Christopher here, and as I mentioned up top this episode is coming out waaay after we recorded it. Dogsred is out now in print and has lots of chapters to read online (legitimately…) as well. Because more info has come out about this series since we’re further from the series’ launch, we’ve got lots more info that we didn’t when we recorded this episode. I don’t thing anything is egregiously wrong, just a little out of date, so I hope you’ll forgive us.
03:10 – David had my back, and if you listen to the last 20 seconds of the podcast you’ll see how faulty my memory wasn’t…
Also in here and for the first little bit, Chip and I talk about the sort of strange pacing of this book. It’s front-loaded, lots of info-dumps, lots of trying to make you care about the character in the first chapter. Apparently (as we found out later) Noda-sensei felt that his previous series Supinamarada! started too slowly and didn’t grab folks, and went hard on the opening here to try and hook people quick. It may account for some of our issues with the book.
7:30 – The lips aren’t great. I have no idea what’s going on with her face here. The drawing of the skating is great though, and David actually comes back to reference it later in the episode.
I think we lost the video for this episode so I can’t show you Chip’s actual look of disgust, but I’m sure you can imagine.
13:00 – These guys don’t look like teenagers, in my humble opinion, and they’re all like weirdly grizzled, Golden Kamuy-style.
Now that said, I think David makes a great point when he says that they look like teens in a Shonen Jump manga, as these characters are supposed to be about the same age as Jotaro, from Hirohiko Araki’s Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, which you can see below is 17 years old…
It makes sense, as Noda has cited Araki’s work as an influence.
We also talked about this issue as it appeared in one of the most important shonen sports works, Ashita No Joe, which had Joe as a pro-level boxer beating up grownups at 14. Looks like it’s a genre trope!
17:30 – I think I bounced off this series at first because of the disconnect in tone between my expectations and reality, and then secondarily for the really info-dump ice hockey explainer stuff. I think if I had more closely caught on to what was going on with the tone and whatnot, say by an obvious over-reaction appearing somewhere as a “clue”, I might’ve had a better time with it at the beginning.
18:34 – Like we said, there’s spoilers for volume 2 in this episode! Because yes, they do “speedrun” a bit of the beginning of the story to get to the 3/11 disaster in Japan and how it affected these young people and their career aspirations. I think by the end of volume 2 and the beginning of volume 3, the manga is really where the creator wants it to be, and I found myself enjoying the later chapters more. That said, it really does propel you through, so it’s not a “it starts getting good in volume 3” situation, it’s solid from the beginning (unless you know all about Hockey…), it’s more of a “it comes into its own.”
21:30 – It really is interesting what the Golden Kamuy manga and its success did to shine a spotlight on the Ainu people and the settling of Hokkaido. I can’t think of many pieces of comics or manga that have had as huge of a (positive) impact on a society as Golden Kamuy.
I need a clickbait YouTube video on this, “5 COMICS THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING” and like Golden Kaumy might be top-2.
23:00:
“The baseball bat is not for taking out the catcher when you’re approaching the plate, to get another run”
– Christopher“You’re describing a much more interesting sport.”
– Chip
24:25 – This becomes something of a theme for me this season: Manga could be better if it wasn’t beholden to the restrictions of the manga industry. I do bring this up with a few other reads later on as well.
25:05 – Ah, the overly-brutal asshole coach with outdated training methods, which really is a trope in manga.
We first encountered this trope in Akiko Higashimura’s Blank Canvas, which I think we all liked quite a bit. You can listen to that episode here: https://www.mangasplaining.com/blog/ep-31-blank-canvas-by-akiko-higashimura/
26:58 – You’re just gonna have to read the comic to get the “guy wearing his own face on a shirt” gag.
27:45 – We will, however, share with you this insane cat sequence from chapter 1:
You can also see what we’re talking about here with like Sketchup and whatnot with the cabin in the top panel.
28:05 – I feel like I’ve referenced this Maxell ad before, of the speakers just blowing everything else away…?
That’s the vibe that I got from this page, where Rou has stepped onto the ice for the first time and the sheer power, presence, and intensity of his starting pose has a physical effect on the audience members:
28:22 – Thank goodness for Tomoko-chan, the only person in the book who understands the weight and gravity of what’s going on inside Rou’s tortured soul.
29:45 – So yeah, this is apparently called “Glow Puck” and it was kind of deeply hated by Canada on the whole. But it was when Fox got the NHL license and wanted to make the game easier to follow for new players… and they did it like this:
Dogsred actually does do something similar here, by often giving the puck a trail or a little extra bit of attention and glow, which Chip didn’t love.
30:50 – Sydney Crosby manga!
My algorithm is gonna be wacky after looking up all of this hockey stuff.
32:16 – One of the things we loved most in Dogsred was the storytelling and the visual elements used to convey it. Chip liked the strong storytelling but hated the arrows (as you can see above). David mentioned these crazy blocky shadows made entirely in tone, and then there was a fascinating mix of chunky shadows incorporating arrows and speedlines. Some really interesting stuff!
34:30 – As you can see from the examples previous, the facemasks are generally not shown if it’ll interfere with showing the emotions of the characters. But as mentioned, there are a lot of options now, like plastic facemasks, though some players claim they warp their vision too much:
35:00 – I also wanted to include an example of character’s faces appearing inside their word balloons for people whoa re talking from off-panel. I think I first saw this in the American comic Impulse, by Mark Waid and Humberto Ramos?
42:09 – We’re not going to include the images here, but from later on in the series in a particularly grueling training sequence, and there’s a bear, a phallic log, and a truck, and what happens is obscene and hilarious. You’re just gonna have to read it, it’s around chapter 20.
45:12 – Trouble, a weirdly controversial comic book series from Marvel comics at the time, used photo covers as it was intended to be an update on old romance/slice-of-life comics from Marvel’s past… but they actually made it about Peter Parker’s mom & dad and Aunt May & Uncle Ben. Honestly, I thought it was a good idea to have photo covers back in the day, and in today’s context there’s nothing scandalous about this at all, but people were really up in arms about it.
For comparison, here’s the most recent Weekly Young Jump cover
You can make up your own mind on that.
49:10 – Still not showing you the bear.
51:35 – A super boring fight drawn like a pretty real-life hockey fight.
54:15 – This is a great bit of Mangasplaining, Deb! Or perhaps Catsplaining! Animals really (generally) don’t like those full bottles of water…
57:48 – The younger players are weird as hell, but they add a lot of fun to the proceedings.
Now these goofy little guys look like hockey players. Several of them end up narrating the match.
I think we talked about this in Ashita no Joe and another episode or two maybe, but the kids end up playing a “Greek Chorus” sort of a role, commenting on the action. In this case literally through narration “in-world” but also for us as readers. This is some complex storytelling from Noda here, good stuff!
59:00 – Somewhere in here, David mentions a wrestling promo that takes a shot at The Toronto Maple Leafs, and he graciously provided a video for you to enjoy.
1:01 – Supinamarada! Can’t remember where I read that anecdote though, sorry for not being able to source it.
1:03:00 – And finally, Chip jumps ahead and shouts-out the move SLAP SHOT! with Paul Newman, his favorite sports move of all time. I like this one too, though my fav is probably either The Natural with Robert Redford on the Ping Pong movie based on Taiyo Matsumoto’s manga. But SLAP SHOT! is really great too, worth watching!
01:04:16 THE BREAK
TIME TO PICK BOOKS: We had a fun time this episode, and picking books for future episodes was no different!
David “tricks” Chip into choosing a special “Is it manga?” episode with two self-published works, Death Transit Tanager by Karl Kerschl, & Fighting Storm by Aleksis “Sarracenian” and Brian Naughton. You can actually read both books for free! And I’ve taken so long with this episode that actually there’s a print book out now for Death Transit Tanager:
Death Transit Tanager: https://karlkerschl.com/death-transit-tanager/
Fighting Storm: https://sarracenian.itch.io/krfightingstorm
Christopher bargains for Chip to cover She Loves to Cook, She Loves to Eat, by Sakaomi Yuzaki and published by Yen Press.
Deb picks Yakuza Fiance by Asuka Konishi, published by Seven Seas Entertainment.
And Chip is bullied into covering two more volumes of Even Though We’re Adults, by Takako Shimura and published by Seven Seas. Lotta Seven Seas titles!
So the upcoming episodes look like this (barring any last-minute changes or sponsored episodes):
- #121 – The Fable vol. 1 & vol. 8 by Katsuhisa Minami (Kodansha)
- #122 – Tokyo These Days vol 1 by Taiyo Matsumoto (VIZ)
- #123 – Short Cuts vol. 1 by Usamaru Furuya (VIZ, Out of Print)
- #124 – Yakuza Fiance vol. 1 by Asuka Konishi (Seven Seas Entertainment)
- #125 – “Is it manga? Double-header: Death Transit Tanager by Karl Kerschl & Fighting Storm by Sarracenian
- #126 – Even Though We’re Adults vols. 3 & 4 from Takako Shimura (Seven Seas)
- #127 – She Loves to Cook, She Loves To Eat, by Sakaomi Yuzaki (Yen Press)
And that’s this week in Mangasplaining! This episode is also available wherever you get your podcasts, so please subscribe and leave a review, so others can discover our show.
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Next week on Mangasplaining:
Get ready for the gangster action/comedy THE FABLE, as we cover volume 1 and volume 8!
Thanks so much for listening! Please support your local comic and manga specialty shop when purchasing these books. 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.
