Sports manga

The genre achieved prominence in the context of the post-war occupation of Japan, and gained significant visibility during and subsequent to the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

[3] Other common story formulas include underdog characters who achieve success in the face of staggering odds,[5][6] and amateurs who unexpectedly discover that they are naturally gifted at a sport.

[6][7] Writer Paul Gravett notes that "in the end, a sports manga hero is bound to win, or lose well, so the thrill comes from reading how he overcomes all challenges with determination and honesty".

[8] Common themes in sports manga include friendship and camaraderie, teamwork and selflessness, steadfastness and determination, prevailing over hardships, and supokon-kei (a contraction of supōtsu-konjō-kei, which translates literally to 'willpower in-sports-genre').

[9] The genre is additionally noted for its highly stylized depictions of the action of sports, such as jarring layouts, speed lines, sound effects, blurred and foreshortened figures, and cinematic-style framing.

[10][11] Decompression is a common storytelling technique used in sports manga to heighten drama and suspense, with individual games or events frequently lasting hundreds of pages or multiple episodes.

[4][5] The manga series Slam Dunk, for example, is noted for presenting a four-month high-school basketball season over the course of six years' worth of weekly serialized stories.

[14] Real-life sporting events that could be filmed by a single unmoving camera (such as pro wrestling or sumo) became popular televised sports, which discouraged anime and manga creators from attempting to adapt them; Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy note that creators realized the genre's "true potential lay in showing audiences [...] things they would not get so easily from live action".

[10] In the 1970s, merchandising became a major sales driver for anime, leading to a proliferation of series such as Speed Racer that had potential as toys; baseball would also re-emerge as a popular subject for the genre.

[3] Conversely, some 1980s sports manga such as Captain Tsubasa gained popularity on the basis of foreign sales potential;[18] the series has been translated for international audiences in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian.

[18] Spo-kon stories with stylized action and scrappy protagonists enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in the 2010s, as typified by series such as Ping Pong the Animation and Kuroko's Basketball.