Sports Fan Service

Boys of Summer is a sweet, funny and sexy coming of age story about a young guy and his best friend as they embark on their freshman year of college. It's a difficult (and comedic) transition for these two as they leave their small town and families behind and quickly find themselves immersed in the craziness of dorm life, baseball tryouts and free-spirited college girls.

~Rob Valois, Editor

Bud Waterston is a decent-looking guy in full hormonal bloom. He's heading for college and the imagined sexual liberation of living in a dormitory full of other post-teenagers in full hormonal bloom. But like all best-laid plans—forgive the pun—nothing goes as Bud hoped or expected. His roommate turns out to be a closeted homosexual. All the good-looking girls in the dorm are interested in somebody else, or in the case of one especially gorgeous co-ed he can't seem to stop thinking about, interested in him dead last. When he learns she's on the school baseball team, it inspires him to join the beleaguered band of misfits in an effort to prove to her she's all wrong about him. Or at least that he's not as disgusting as she thinks he is.

Chuck Austen:
Chuck Austen (writer) has worked in various forms of creativity most of his adult life, from commercial illustration, to video games, to animation on shows like King of the Hill and Tripping the Rift which he co-created, to western superhero comic books. But his passion has always been manga. An enormous fan of creators such as Mitsuru Adachi, Otomo Katsuhiro, and Naoki Urasawa, it has long been a dream of his to work in the medium they excelled within, and Boys of Summer is his first work in this arena. Chuck lives on Los Angeles with his wife, three kids, two cats, two birds and one dog. They live in the house. He lives out back in a small, converted toolshed.

Hiroki Otsuka:
Hiroki Otsuka (artist) was born in Shiga, Japan in 1974. He studied graphic design at The Tokyo Designer Gakuin, Aichi, Japan. He lived in Tokyo for two years before deciding to move to the United States. After a brief time in San Francisco, he settled in New York City and currently lives in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn. He has created erotic comics for various publishing companies in Japan under his name and the pen name Pirontan. Some of his most memorable comics have been I Love Shock and Pirontan 21.

Bud:
Bud: Our main character. A brash, horny young post-teenager who's going to college primarily to be unsupervised by his mother—and to get laid. He has issues with his father, who committed suicide and died in his arms. He has tended to hate anything his father loved because of this "selfish act," including, and particularly, baseball. Witty, charming, but naive and a bit lost in the ways of women, he will make many mistakes of his own on his journey through college...and toward a Major League pitching career? Will these mistakes lead him to understand his parents' own humanity and the mistakes they made, allowing him to let go of the anger he has toward his dad so he can fulfill his own dreams? Bud is a bit of fire and brimstone, has a bit of a temper, and too often assumes he knows everything there is to know about everything. Confident and a bit arrogant, but kind and charming in his way, he would never betray a friend, but might do something to prick the ego of someone he doesn't like, even if it screws up his own life in the process—not because he's stupid, but because he often doesn't consider all the consequences of his actions ahead of time. Naive and cocky...a deadly combination. In other words, he's a bit of an adolescent, in a world where he's expected to start acting more like an adult.

Manny:
A momma's boy in the truest sense of the word. He complains that he has a tough time getting her to let go of him, and yet he himself can't seem let go. The catcher on the college team, Manny knows how good Bud is and has been trying to get him to join any team for years. He's more than delighted that Bud has joined their college team together, even if it's only because of Chrissie. Manny is a good friend and a basically sweet person who worries too much and spends too much time on the phone with his mom. He would never do anything to betray people he cares for and is extremely forgiving of Bud's transgressions—perhaps more so than he should be. He dreams of one day being part of a battery with Bud on a Major League team. He even helps play matchmaker with Bud and Chrissie, often with disastrous results. Manny's the kind of guy who would do that for a friend even if he were in love with the girl himself.

Chrissie:
Yin to Bud's Yang. Also a bit fiery, strong-willed and determined; tends to judge a bit too quickly and a bit too harshly. She's just come of age in a world where her mother was put upon, and sees everything as a sexist assault. She's a bit of a lone voice in the wilderness when it comes to complaining about the Golden twins walking around mostly naked in the dorms, or about Bud or the other guys encouraging them with their attentions. She's got a point, but she's spitting in the wind if she thinks anyone's going to listen to her. And it isn't that she wants to ruin everyone's fun—it's just that she's often missing out on any fun because she's so busy looking for how that fun could be more politically correct. Like Bud, she'll have the opportunity to learn from her own mistakes—and from her own desires—exactly what it is that she believes, rather than simply parroting causes that often have grains of truth in them but are missing a load of reality. Determined not to be her mother, who was a housewife and homemaker who never had a career or life of her own outside of the family, Chrissie wants to make the world over in her image rather than to project her image and meet the world as it is and let it accept her. She, too, would never betray a friend, and is the kind of person who would say, "Women need to be appreciated more for their minds than their beauty"—while secretly wanting the men on the floor to find her as attractive as they find the Golden twins.

PopCulutureShock
I didn’t pick up Boys of Summer when it first came out for the following reasons:

1. It’s about baseball.
2. Bikini chick on cover does not appeal to my hetero girl sensibilities.
3. It’s OEL.

Nevertheless, the MangaCast couldn’t shut up about it. They love sports manga and Ed Chavez loves baseball as much as he loves manga (”a love so big, it could crush this town”). Then at MangaNext I met both the artist and the writer of the book - Hiroki Otsuka and Chuck Austen, respectively.

Hiroki Otsuka was a manga-ka in Japan until the stress nearly killed him. The average artist draws 20-30 pages a month, but Otsuka was drawing 50. He quit his job, moved the U.S. studied English for six months, and currently lives in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, where he is having a great time doing gallery shows of his fine art. Tokyopop hired him to do Boys of Summer.

The writer, Chuck Austen, is a long-time American comic author guy who has penned scripts for Marvel and DC for decades. I’d never heard of him because I’m not into the superhero stuff. He had a bunch of groupies at MangaNext who hung out with him in the hotel bar. They all knew who he was!

Unlike Tokyopop’s Rising Stars-spawned books, Boys of Summer combines a very experienced manga-ka with a very experienced writer. The result is happily like an American indy comic drawn by a Japanese guy.

Protagonist Bud moves out of his single mom’s house to go to college. His fat and somewhat irritating best friend Manny is going to the same college and trying out for the baseball team. Manny can’t convince Bud to join, even though Bud is an awesome pitcher.

The coach’s daughter, Chrissie happens to live across the hall from Bud and happens to discover his pitching arm. It also happens that she’s the only girl on the baseball team.

There are a few manga-moments in the book, the I-saw-you-naked-accidentaly moments, or the Why-is-that-girl-sitting-on-your-lap-it’s-just-a-big-misunderstanding moments. Fortunately, these elements are well balanced with a very realistic story about a very average college (possibly in the midwest) and some very realistic college guys. There are a lot of true-to-life characters and true-to-life moments, balancing out the ultimate cliche of how Bud can never pitch again because his father died in a horrible baseball accident (probably not the case).

1. Very little baseball is played.
2. She’s almost never in her underwear - almost.
3. It’s not exactly OEL… It’s just a comic being done by an international team.

I suspect this manga may have been looked over by a lot of fans like me based on the cover design alone.

Boys of Summer volume two is due out this fall… maybe. Tokyopop hasn’t announced anything about it since volume one came out. If volume two ever happens, I’m looking forward to it.

~Erin F., PopCulutureShock
http://www.popcultureshock.com/index.php?p=42582