Blizzard Axel

ブリザード・アクセル

• by Suzuki Nakaba
• runs in Sunday

I woke up early this morning to watch figure skating only to discover that Seattle's evil ABC affiliate has once again decided not to bother broadcasting it. I can only assume they hate me. One of the main reasons I'm paying for cable is so that I don't ever miss figure skating, and now I can't even watch the broadcast versions.
I imagine there aren't a great number of men who spend time sitting around and bitching because they only ever show the women's free on TV, and I want to see the short, both mens, and both pairs as well. Admittedly, this is not a large portion of my bitching quotient, but the fact that it is there at all is entirely because of Blizzard Axel.
Yes, a shonen sports manga about figure skating.
While Suzuki's earlier golfing manga was fun because it completely ignored what a tedious sport golf is, Blizzard Axel is fun because it is absolutely in love with figure skating, and absolutely determined to make its readers love the sport too.
Figure skating is the only sport in the world where people perform alone, surrounded by hundreds of people, for an incredibly long time. No amount of practice can overcome the stage fright. So naturally, the main character of Blizzard Axel is psychotically, pathologically, in need of as much attention as possible all of the time.
He becomes a figure skater exactly because he can make everyone look at him, and only him, for minutes on end, and make them all love him for it.
Of course, thirteen is awfully late to begin a career as a figure skater, and he has to learn every technique from the ground up very, very quickly. Which provides a nice series of challenges while neatly teaching the readers the basics of figure skating as well.
But technical scores are only half of figure skating -- artistic scores account for a very complicated and arbitrary sounding part of the score, and so the book also spends a great deal of time showing use exactly how the skaters are interpreting the music better than that other team that happened to use the same music.
Once the book progresses to actual competitions, Suzuki deftly teaches us exactly what makes one move more difficult than another, without ever making use feel like we're reading something tediously informative. In fact, the pair figure skating was handled so well that I actually started to like pair skating, for the first time ever, and wound up having a very good time watching it at the Winter Olympics. And that was before they fell in love.
I'm really hoping Suzuki Nakada has finally got the hit he's deserved for years here, and hey, if it lasts that long, we might even get an anime in time for Winter 2010.

• Update: Ends at eleven volumes, really strong ending.