365 Days of Manga, Day 214: Speed Racer Mach Go Go Go!

SPEED RACER: MACH GO GO GO • Tatsuo Yoshida • DMP • 13+
Speed Racer is a classic anime, but it’s a pretty simple kid’s show, so catching up on it is not as hard as, say, reading a wikipedia entry on Evangelion. The anime came before the manga, so the 1968 manga adaptation (reportedly drawn by an uncredited Jiro Kuwata, creator of 8-Man) is not a classic so much as a really old licensed tie-in. It’s best consumed with a heavy dose of nostalgia–the art is cramped, old-fashioned and looks like a bad newspaper strip, with none of the realistic detail and cinematic tricks people associate with manga. Each chapter is structured like a half-hour TV show: Speed must race around a perilous mountain while trying to keep crooks from stealing the secret formula written on his windsheild! Speed must race through an erupting volcano while dueling with a racing champion from a primitive pseudo-Incan village! Leaving aside all the godawful comic relief with Speed Racer’s pals “Pops” Racer, Chim-Chim the monkey and Spritle, the main pleasure here is that of a kid playing with toys and shouting “SCREECH! VROOM! The car goes over the edge into the ravine and explodes in flames! KABLAM!” Readers who enjoy Speed Racer’s small doses of savagery and mayhem (such as the chapter in which a brother and sister avenge themselves on their father’s killers with a radio-controlled car) may want to check out Mikiya Mochizuki’s Wild 7, a 1969 manga about motorcycle cops which is to Speed Racer what Dirty Harry is to Encyclopedia Brown. (Review by Jason Thompson – originally printed in Otaku USA magazine.)
** (two stars)
Today’s winner is… (opens the sealed envelope) Andrew L. of Maryland! Congratulations, Andrew! Now let’s pull back the curtain to look at one of our previous winners, soon to be swimming in a sea of free manga!

Lys B. received a set of shojo manga, of which she already had two, but the works of Tomoko Taniguchi were new. Taniguchi was one of the first shojo artists to get released in English back in the mid-’90s, temporarily giving her status far beyond her minor body of work in Japan. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that — her stuff is cute, and it’s nice seeing translated work that isn’t published by Megacorporate Japanese Publisher X.) Taniguchi has since fallen off the manga radar, depriving the world of her stories of loveable ’80s hair bands and innocent girls. Lys, I’ll send you more manga soon!