The Fall 2022 Manga Guide

Blitz

What's It About? 

Blitz tells the story of Tom, a middle school student in Japan at a school with a number of international students. While he has no interest in the game of chess, he soon falls for his classmate Harmony who is deeply invested in the game. She is a member of the chess club which Tom joins, hoping to grow closer to her. But he soon finds himself in conflict with the chess club president Laurent and challenges him to a match in two months' time. The race to learn the game is on as Tom studies chess and tries to improve his skills while facing increasingly challenging opponents.

Blitz is written by Cédric Biscay and Harumo Sanazaki and illustrated by Daitaro Nishihara, with English translation by Rich Young, and has input and insight from chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. Ablaze will release its first volume physically for $12.99 on November 22.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Blitz is an odd duck, a combination of regular hot-blooded sports manga and full-on chess and intuition propaganda. It's certainly true that any story with a specific focus – chess, volleyball, oil painting, etc. – is going to have elements where it aims to interest the reader into trying out the sport/art/whatever for themselves, but in the case of Blitz it feels just a little more on the nose than usual. I think that this is largely due to the afterword, where scientist Alexis Champion writes about the powers of intuition and how to harness them. It sounds kind of like those sketchy “harness your mental powers!” pamphlets or websites you sometimes see, and that really tanked the tone of the volume for me.

But there's also some genuine appeal to this tale of an international school student in Japan getting into chess. Tom's initially drawn to it because he has a crush on Harmony, an excellent chess player, and that runs him afoul of Laurent, a truly unpleasant individual who uses chess as a means of gatekeeping Harmony. When he challenges Tom to a game in two months' time, he has zero intent of allowing the other boy to join the chess club or get near Harmony (which isn't something he gets to control, but like many assholes, he doesn't realize it), and when Tom plays a good game but loses, it's less the fact that he lost that's an issue and more that Laurent is a terrible, gloating winner. To be perfectly honest, Laurent nearly ruins the book for me every time his smug face shows up on the page.

So now Tom likes chess and Harmony, but apparently that's not enough for Blitz. His French chef friend Jean-Marc sends him to a mysterious shop to meet a wise old Asian stereotype, and then things get weird. Tom is playing with the VR chess headset the old guy gives him when he's struck by lightning and, unless I'm grossly misreading the story, gains the powers of real-life chess master Garry Kasparov. Frankly, the story didn't need a supernatural or science fiction angle, and it feels very much like a ploy to make Tom good enough at chess that he can participate in Kasparov's future-of-chess youth initiative. (Although if it also takes Laurent down a peg, I'm all for it.)

The good news is that this is a very good example of an international manga collaboration that really works. Nothing feels awkwardly pandering to the manga format, and the cast is believably diverse. The art has some issues where characters look like bobbleheads, but it's easy to read and pleasant to look at, and the translation flows very naturally. You may get more out of it if you already play chess, but as someone who doesn't, I still found the games easy to understand. It's not great, but it is interesting, and that may prove to be enough.

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Christopher Farris

Rating:

BLITZ is a manga with a dedicated purpose beyond telling a usual activity-interest story. I don't know much about international professional chess, but even I've heard of Garry Kasparov, and him sponsoring this book signals an agenda to spread the good word of chess to places like Japan where it's a bit more niche. If nothing else, it might spare us scenes like those infamous bits in Code Geass where clearly nobody knows how to play the dang game. And it provides us with one of the funniest fictional disclaimers at the opening I've read in a while, specifying "Apart from Garry Kasparov, any resemblance to real people is purely coincidental". That's gold, and going in I could see the potential for at least a functional good time as far as game-based manga goes. BLITZ has that very manufactured marketable sheen on it, starring a multicultural collection of kids at a specifically-international school in Shibuya, its lead character Tom motivated to join the chess club for the simple purpose of getting closer to the girl he has a crush on. Some of it's simple, but still feels unique in its setup.

But then the actual storytelling of BLITZ moves in real fits and starts. The first several chapters leading up to Tom's inaugural game are taken up by a listless training section that seems to mostly stall getting into the action of the very game this story is supposedly all about showing off. I can appreciate the acknowledgment that chess simply isn't a sport that someone can jump into with barely a run-down of the basics and pull off a win using pure gumption; It takes practice and learning. But that also necessarily undercuts the immediate sports manga pacing BLITZ clearly wants to go for, as halfway through the story, it suddenly seems to realize it needs to grant Tom some sort of advantage to get him up to speed in time for a tournament arc introduced by the end of this volume. Thus things go wholly off the rails, with swerves involving time-traveling ancient chinese virtual chess set salesman and lighting-induced mind-reading intuition powers. And yet even after jumping those tracks, the story still winds up feeling like a glacially-paced road to nowhere.

This is all underscored by the biggest issue BLITZ has: it barely depicts the actual game of chess. There is one extremely basic rundown of the foundational rules of the game a couple chapters in, but after that we get virtually no commentary on any of the actual strategies used by the characters, descriptions of turns or tactics they use, or even analysis that would necessitate the descriptive advantages of Tom's Garry Kasparov Stand powers. Some sports manga can get by on the raw depiction of the action of their games thanks to the inherent excitement of physicality, but chess lacks that kinetic aspect that can be carried by sheer vibes as purely as this story is trying and failing to do. For all BLITZ deigns to tell us about how the characters or playing, the involved game could be checkers, or UNO, or Mouse Trap, and things would basically be the same. On top of all that, the presentation is further marred by publisher Ablaze's issues in this release (at least the digital copy used for this preview), with text misaligning out of word bubbles a regular occurrence, and even the order of a couple pages goofed up near the very end. It all makes for a pretty disparate mess of an experience, which is a pity given its unique subject matter and somewhat interesting framing of it at the outset.