Buggy Whip

Sports manga about a high school boy with terrible tennis skills named Arata that get’s trained by Sakura, a former genius upperclassman.

A pretty decent realistic take on the sport of tennis, similar in feel to Baby Steps. Compared to typical shonen sports manga, this series isn’t about Arata’s journey to become the number one player in Japan. Instead it follows him as he slowly breaks through his own inferiority complex while butting heads against his mentor and it ends quickly once that resolution is reached. This kind of story progression might be why this ran in the seinen magazine Monthly Afternoon. My only complaint was that there wasn’t enough distinction between characters because many of their faces look too similar.

A solid sports manga that was interesting for it’s story.

~dakazu