Eyeshield 21 21

So the battle with the Nagas continues.  I’m not entirely sure if I expected it to end with this volume or not.  I mean, I think every time I join a game in progress, I assume about 1/4 of the way through that it will have concluded at the end of the volume, but it is the way of shounen manga to leave cliffhangers, so I should probably never be surprised when things carry over into yet another volume.  But don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t feel like anything’s being drug out.  The pacing here is absolutely perfect, and even with just the one game, the chapters are filled with a ton of action and tight moments.

There was quite a cliffhanger at the end of the last volume, with Hiruma basically telling absolutely everybody that they were giving up because there was less than 1% of a chance of winning.  But with Hiruma, it’s a trick.  It’s always a trick.  I’m pretty sure that the team wasn’t going to lose to the Nagas (only because I can’t imagine what the series would be about without this tournament and without Hiruma), so I was certain they weren’t giving up.  Still, those were some strong words at the end of the last volume.

They do a good job tricking the Nagas throughout the volume, and eventually it comes down to the need to out-play them.  Can Sena and Monta outplay the two aces on the Nagas?  They’ll have to, of course, but it seems like it will take a physical toll on them.  Injury hasn’t really been addressed in the series so far, but it’s come up here with the possibility of Sena’s knees giving out on him.

Also, Yukimitsu!  Yukimitsu gets to play, and it’s really great.  If shounen sports manga can do anything right, they can make you really feel for the underdog.  Yukimitsu isn’t nearly as good as Agon, or ANYBODY, but he can outplay them in the right situations, and when he makes a key play and breaks down in tears while everybody cheers for him, the benchwarmer, as one of the new key players, it… just gets to you.

That’s not to say that the volume lacks comedy.  I died towards the end when even Hiruma reacts poorly to a bad and/or blunt idea Monta has.  Hiruma’s normal disappointed reactions involve guns, but this time, he’s just drawn with a comically blank face.  Hiruma’s never, EVER has a blank expression on his face, and it’s an absolutely perfect visual gag when it shows up here.  It’s like the artist was saving that expression up for a rainy day, when he knew the volume would need an extra laugh at the end.

Also, hey!  Who put a Moto Hagio reference in my Eyeshield 21?  I actually had to check, because I wanted to see if it was something that was in the Japanese edition too, that there was actually a chapter called “They Were 11.”  There was.  Now the question is, is it really a Moto Hagio reference, or just a coincidence?  Maybe a little of both?  They are spelled slightly differently in Japanese, but maybe it’s a common enough Japanese phrase that it’s a coincidence.  It seems like there could be more than one way to translate the phrase into English though, so maybe the link is intentional in the English version.  If that’s the case, congratulations are in order for me and the one other person who’s read English translations of both Moto Hagio and Eyeshield 21, because that’s a true “nary the twain shall meet” situation.