Ashita No Joe: Fighting for Tomorrow by Tetsuya Chiba & Ikki Kajiwara

TL;DR: You can clearly see how this is such a classic in it’s genre, and while not perfect for me it’s very engaging.
Source: NetGalley, thank you to the publisher!

Plot: Joe is a wandering orphan who moves to a new neighborhood. He finds friends, fans, and enemies alike.
Characters: Some of these characters I did like a lot, but Joe himself I found so frustrating to read about.
Setting: This I liked as well. The slum he makes ‘home’ for a time is vibrant and a great setting.
Art: The art here was the most interesting part for me as it really undercut that grittiness in the story and made it much more approachable and lighthearted at times.

Thoughts:

Ashita no Joe is a classic manga that has had several spin-offs and adaptations since it came out in 1968. There is a lot of fascinating history to this story, I highly recommend looking into it if you’re interested in it and or classic manga in general. While the beginning of the story isn’t my favorite, and Joe is a bit of an unlikeable sort, I did really enjoy where and what the manga did over the course of this first volume.

Joe moves himself to a new neighborhood, the slums of San’ya. There he catches the eye of a former professional boxer and the two start a sort of cat and mouse. Danpei wants more than anything to train Joe, while Joe just seems to want to fight. Eventually Joe ends up in a reformatory where this volume ends. Joe throughout this is both a sort of conman and a streetfighter. He refuses Danpei’s help until the last half of the book and we see him start to use his growing boxing skills to fight those who put him down.

I liked the art on this a lot. It’s very much the older style of the day, a vastly different style than we normally see in sports manga these days. It’s more cartoony, and overexaggerated and that helps to cut this story’s grittiness and sometimes dark moments. I think if you’re a fan of this genre and manga in general this is a great story to pick up and try out. I’ll likely try to continue the series myself as it should have about 8 volumes to come on this run. A fascinating reprint of a classic!