Ryan Cecil Smith

Wow, this is a weird book! Basically it’s bad. The only thing going for it is that it manages to make tennis really exciting. This is, I guess, the most important point, but it’s drawn so sloppily, the story is unoriginal, and the characters suck. It’s an exciting but really stupid book.

The story is cut from a very typical mold: the main character is really good at his hobby, and he has to take part in challenge after challenge testing his abilities, and he wins every time. Each time, everyone around him says the same things: “Wow!” “I can’t believe it!” “He’s amazing!” So far, in Volume 1, the Tennis Prince hasn’t lost a match. It follows a formula that is used in manga for every activity imaginable: sports, fighting, backgammon, video games, music, you name it. You could make the title “The Prince of Handball” or “The Prince of Coffee Baristas” and tell the exact same story.

The characters bring absolutely nothing to the story. The main character is all good: he’s the best tennis player in the whole school (even though he just arrived from elementary school), he’s soft-spoken, he’s modest, he’s quick-witted, and he follows all the rules without complaint. The bullies – the 2nd year tennis club members – are total jerks and cowards. They trick the younger students into impossible matches (actually the Tennis Prince will of course win those), they steal their rackets, and they cheat in matches (which of course the Tennis Prince will also win). The coach is a wise old woman who believes in the hero. The club captain is the perfect leader: popular, fair, and the best player on the team. The love interest is a shy girl who just watches what’s going on.

As for the drawing, it’s so bad. I don’t know how to critique this kind of thing. The artist can draw cool-looking hair cuts and he can manage to draw characters in different positions, but there’s no life to the line, to the gesture, or to the page composition. Even though I don’t think I can judge manga very well, the storytelling is pretty bad. A lot of pages are cramped and there’s never any motion between panels. It’s really cluttered, but I can find my way by checking the characters’ haircuts and following the dialogue. I think there are examples of sports manga that can tell a fast-paced story with lots of characters and action really well, but this isn’t one of them.

All of that said, The Prince of Tennis is really exciting at times. There are really good setups where the onlookers realize what the Prince’s next move is going to be as he’s swinging his racket to hit the ball, and time stops for a second, before he slams some really cool twist or return or something. It makes you smile when he surprises and humiliates the jerks who pick on younger students. Also, with every match, the Prince reveals some new skill or trick, so you want to see what happens next.

Middle school and high school students in Japan typically belong to one sport or club, and they stay in that club for their entire school career. They practice before and after school with their teammates, they go on trips together, and I guess they think about their club a lot more than I thought about the different clubs in my high school. It’s a big part of their identity so they ought to read club-specific manga, too. Basically, there’s a built-in audience for manga like this, and it’s automatically going to sell, so long as it looks like other popular manga and is kind of dramatic and includes a few bits of realism sprinkled in. That’s The Prince of Tennis.