The History of Sports Manga & Anime

This past Sunday at FanimeCon in San Jose, I gave a 50-minute panel about the history of sports manga and anime. It was held in the smallest of the four available panel rooms at the convention but the room looked full when I started speaking so that was good.

My presentation was mainly broken into three parts:

• booms in manga & anime about particular sports with some historical details about Japanese sport history
• samples of some more contemporary sports manga with focuses on disciplines like volleyball and rugby
• the performance of sports manga and anime in the US and what series have been published here

Although I gave a similar panel in 2012 at both Fanime and Otakon on manga about sports featured in the Summer and Winter Olympics (like rowing and curling), I was still a bit nervous before getting into the room and onto the stage. While listening to my audio recording afterward, I realized I spent a bit too much time attempting to explain the Japanese sport history parts. There were also points where I made references to performances and developments off the top of my head that I had vaguely recalled from doing research over the past couple months. That caused me to have to speed through the last portion of the presentation since I was down to my last 5 to 10 minutes at that point.

Overall, I think I did an okay job in presenting it and those who attended the panel seemed to appreciate it, particularly the ones who didn’t know much about the series that came out decades ago. I haven't seen many written reactions online after the panel aside from one person calling it “decent”. I'm interested to read some informed criticism since it was my first time giving this particular presentation.

I combined my own recorded audio & panel slides into a video for people who couldn’t attend in person as well as those who were there but missed some parts of it. Please watch it and provide some feedback and corrections of what I might have gotten wrong (for example, saying Mix takes place in same high school as H2 when it's in fact Touch) or should have mentioned so I can make adjustments for a possible future installment of such a panel and so I can also make annotations to the video.

Finally, the reason I gave this panel and ones in the past is that I genuinely like sports as well as anime & manga and I enjoy seeing how fictional combinations of them turn out. I don't feel like I have actually watched or read enough titles to consider myself an expert on the subject but I would like to promote awareness of them any way I can.

Thanks for reading (and watching)!

About the Author

CalAggie (Tom Langston) is an Anime/manga consumer, occasional blogger, sports fan, out-of-practice philosopher. Avatar: GZ (Iron Leaguer) Header: Mikakunin OP. Follow him @CalAggie