Welcome to This Week in Shonen Jump, our weekly check in on Viz’s various Shonen Jump series. Viz has recently changed their release format, but our format will mostly remain the same. We will still review the newest chapters of one title a week, now with even more options at our disposal. The big change for our readers is that, even without a Shonen Jump subscription, you can read these most recent chapters for free at Viz.com or using their app.
This week, Brian checks in with “Dogsred.” If you have thoughts on this or any other current Shonen Jump titles, please let us know in the comments!
Dogsred Chapter 1: Rabid Prince
Written and illustrated by Satoru Noda
Translated by John Werry
Lettered by Steve Dutro
Reviewed by Brian Salvatore
An older sports manga by Satoru Noda (“Golden Kamuy”), “Dogsred” is newly serialized in Shonen Jump, with the first eight chapters dropping last week. Sports is one of my favorite genres of manga, and Noda does a great job instantly playing with expectation of the sport that the first chapter covers: figure skating. When imagining figure skating, most people would imagine immaculate ice and precise movements. Noda messes with that by using movement lines to create chaos around what Rou does on the ice, but it doesn’t take away from the beauty or grace of the routine that he’s doing. The technique gives the routine more intensity and helps to illustrate the difficulty in what Rou is doing, rather than just highlighting its beauty.
It also presages the aggression that Rou has inside of him, and foreshadows his embrace of ice hockey at the end of the chapter. What is so effective about this storytelling is that it doesn’t allow hockey to be seen as the superior sport, or the tougher activity. Sure, it has more intensity on the ice, but Noda does a superb job of showing Nou’s talent and hard work that led to his success as part and parcel with the talent and hard work that leads to hockey success. I’m unsure of the culture around figure skating in Japan, but in the United States, it clearly has baggage, especially for men, of being a very ‘feminine’ sport. Additionally, you’re still likely to encounter homophobia in the discussion of figure skating in the general sports discourse. This story doesn’t for one second give in to that impulse.
That’s not to say that this story doesn’t have some clichés present, specifically the dead/dying mother that seems to be at the heart of so many sports mangas or the rival siblings who just can’t understand each other. Those fuel Rou as a character, but don’t really define the story one way or another. There’s something really nice about how all of the personal conflict, and there’s a lot of it, seem secondary, both to Rou and the reader, to the conflict of sports. At least in its first chapter, “Dogsred” is a sports manga with an emphasis on the sports, as opposed to a story simply dressed with sport images.
I am interested to see how the more provincial setting will play into the story. The cultural change almost sets up a natural ‘slobs vs snobs’ story, but with the protagonist a snob. The story plays out in a streamlined, simple way, which allows the reader to get to know Rou and his struggles well before diving into the future of the story. Instead of throwing us into the deep end, this first chapter went painted a really effective starting place for the story, without making it feel expository or overly explained.
Final Verdict: 8.4 – An expressive, emotive journey through two very different sports.
