Review by Woodrow Phoenix
Baseball arrived in Japan in 1859, and by 1920 it was Japan’s most popular sport, and Bat Kid, written and drawn by Inoue Kazuo between 1947 and 1949 is a significant strip in several ways. It was the first major baseball manga in Japan, one of the first popular strips that caused a big growth in postwar comics reading, and the beginning of sports manga, a huge genre in Japanese publishing. This English translation by Ryan Holmberg is based on the condensed book edition of Bat Kid which was the top-selling children’s manga in Tokyo’s Mitsukoshi department store in 1948. It does double duty as an introduction to a series that was such a beloved feature of Manga Shōnen magazine, and as a historical primer. It’s a chunky book of 168 pages and fully 66 of those pages are devoted to the history of baseball manga in Japan before and after the second world war, and the artists and features associated with it.
Bat Kid is the adventures of young Nagai Batto, a stereotypically good-natured and hard-working young boy who wants to join his local youth baseball team. He fails at his first try-out: “I stink, I’ll never be a real player…” but he doesn’t give in: “Wait! No one is perfect when they first try something!” and the stories progress through him learning how to bat, how to catch and then how to play alongside his teammates to win a match.
Bat’s interactions with the boys on his team, his coach, his parents and others are light, sensible and wholesome in their tone and the drawings that Inoue Kazuo uses to tell these stories are simple, but do have a little something interesting stylistically. As seen on the cover of this book, Kazuo pushes the mouth line of Bat Kid up under his eyeline to where the nose would be, and this small adjustment has a really huge impact on his face, turning his grimace of effort into a super cartoony, cute and distinctive drawing selling the idea of heroic effort in a memorable and funny way. This strip has that little quirkiness in its style that edges the generic niceness into something more engaging. Kazuo throws in baseball puzzles, games and quizzes alongside the strips to challenge and amuse his readers and a selection of those appear here. As for the history, the back of the book features an extensive look at the birth of Bat Kid, the career of Inoue Kazuo and the evolution of baseball and the manga industry that grew around it, with lots of great images from the period.
Whether you’re a fan of manga, of baseball, of Japanese cultural history, or some combination of those three, there is enough here to pique your interest in this intriguing look at a little-known part of comics history. It’s a jolly, unchallenging read that isn’t likely to stay with you for long after you put it down, but Bat Kid’s positive ‘can do’ spirit is hard to resist and it’s fun while it lasts.
