Ping Pong 1

I’ve been reading Taiyou (sometimes translated as Taiyo - I don’t know which is “right”) Matsumoto’s Ping Pong. I first came across his work in the mid-90’s, browsing through the Japanese weeklies - his artwork stood out a lot - in the way it combined and unusual, for manga of the time, western or european influence - while retaining a certain more Japanese style of extreme speed and movement. A few works have appeared in English translations since (Blue Spring, a couple issues of No. 5 and most notably, Black and White - which has since been collected again under the title, Tekkon Kinkreet). Ping Pong and a couple of other works are available in French. I’m not super far into the series yet - just to chapter seven, or page 120 - but not surprisingly, I’m enjoying what I’ve read so far. First, the idea of a 1,000 page comic centered around a high-school ping pong club is intriguingly different from the type of comics I usually come across. Second, I’m fascinated by the bite sized episodes - the way he breaks up the story. So little will happen in each chapter, I wonder how people originally could retain the story when it was published serially… you really just get the vaguest of glimpses of what’s going on in each episode - a few scraps of dialog spread out across twenty pages (or so) - it’s also all very inter-cut and sort of impressionistic - it’s slow and fast at the same time - a most tricky combination. I’ll write more as I get further into the series…