Slam Dunk

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Alternative Titles

Japanese: SLAM DUNK

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Information

Type: Manga

Volumes: 31

Chapters: 276

Status: Finished

Published: Sep 18, 1990 to Jun 4, 1996

Genres: Award Winning, Sports

Themes: School, Team Sports

Demographic: Shounen

Serialization: Shounen Jump (Weekly)

Authors: Inoue, Takehiko (Story & Art)

Statistics

Score: 9.08¹ (scored by 71,538 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #6²

² based on the top manga page. Please note that 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #56

Members: 159,419

Favorites: 15,128

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Wikipedia

9.08

Ranked #6Popularity #56Members 159,419

MangaShounen Jump (Weekly)Inoue, Takehiko (Story & Art)

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Volumes: /31

Chapters: /276

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Synopsis

Hanamichi Sakuragi, a tall, boisterous teenager with flame-red hair and physical strength beyond his years, is eager to put an end to his rejection streak of 50 and finally score a girlfriend as he begins his first year of Shohoku High. However, his reputation for delinquency and destructiveness precedes him, and most of his fellow students subsequently avoid him like the plague. As his first day of school ends, he is left with two strong thoughts: "I hate basketball" and "I need a girlfriend."

Haruko Akagi, ignorant of Hanamichi's history of misbehavior, notices his immense height and unwittingly approaches him, asking whether or not he likes basketball. Overcome by the fact that a girl is speaking to him, the red-haired giant blurts out a yes despite his true feelings. At the gym, Haruko asks if he can do a slam dunk. Though a complete novice, Hanamachi palms the ball and makes the leap...but overshoots, slamming his head into the backboard. Amazed by his near-inhuman physical abilities, Haruko quickly notifies the school's basketball captain of his feat. With this, Hanamichi is unexpectedly thrust into a world of competition for a girl he barely knows, but he soon discovers that there is perhaps more to basketball than he once thought.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Background

Slam Dunk was awarded the 40th Shogakukan Manga Award for best shounen manga in 1994. In a 2006 poll for the 10th Japan Media Arts Festival, the series was voted by Japanese fans as the #1 manga series of all time. With over 120 million copies sold as of 2012, it is one of the most successful manga series to date. Its wide success led to a large increase in the popularity of basketball in Japanese youth. In 2010, Takehiko Inoue received special commendations from the Japan Basketball Association for popularizing basketball in Japan.

The series was published in English by Gutsoon! Entertainment under the Raijin Comics Imprint for five volumes from July 2, 2003 to May 5, 2004. After Gutsoon's shutdown, publishing rights to Slam Dunk were purchased by VIZ Media who then republished the series under the Shonen Jump imprint from September 2, 2008 to December 3, 2013. It was published in Spanish by Ivrea España from February 2003 to September 2005 and republished in Kanzenban from January 2010 to May 2016.

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Related Manga

Adaptation:

Slam Dunk, The First Slam Dunk

More characters
Characters

Sakuragi, Hanamichi

Main

Mitsui, Hisashi

Main

Rukawa, Kaede

Main

Miyagi, Ryouta

Main

Akagi, Takenori

Main

Sendou, Akira

Supporting

Mito, Youhei

Supporting

Akagi, Haruko

Supporting

Anzai, Mitsuyoshi

Supporting

Fujima, Kenji

Supporting

Reviews

May 3, 2023

Walmon72

Recommended

Slam Dunk Review - This is my first review so ill try my best to point things out

Initially i am not the kind of person to review anything since i simply don't really want too, but since i wanted to only review manga/anime series that has a rating of 9 out of 10 or 10 out of 10 i would do a review on it and have made that promise till that day. This is my first review formulating this and i will make sure to try my best to keep it compact and at point as much as i can, but of course it ...

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May 22, 2023

thizlas

Mixed Feelings

It is not rare for shounen sports manga to end up focusing more on the characters and on their evolution than on a careful representation of the sport they practice. Slam Dunk opts for the opposite approach, as it relies much more on the tension generated by realistically and extensively-depicted basketball than on character-development to offer an engaging experience. My opinion is that it only partly succeeds in this undertaking because it is brought down by some significant flaws.

This review will mainly be a critique of what I consider to be Slam Dunk's main weaknesses: its characters, its dialogues and the way its basketball ... games are structured. I will however start by mentioning the manga's visual representation of the sport, which I found to be its main quality.

Inoue's art, which is already above average at the start of the manga, consistently gets better and successfully brings the basketball games to life in a both realistic and striking manner. Along with the masterful way in which the panels are laid out, it effectively displays the difficulty of the moves it depicts and equally contributes to bringing suspense and strong payoffs to the games. The few text-less scenes are especially impressive, I found them breathtaking.

Apart from those strictly technical aspects, several other elements pertain to the ambition of the manga to rely on pure and realistic basketball: the rules and main moves are progressively explained to the reader at the same time as the protagonist is learning them, and many of those moves are as well-described as they are impressively showcased. Furthermore, legitimate tactics play a major role in the games. Even though the characters can be extremely talented at using some techniques, they don't have any of the nearly magical secret powers one can often find in shounen manga.

This being said, it doesn't mean that Slam Dunk is free of the usual shounen sports manga framework, as its main storyline is as typical as it gets for this kind of manga: there is a steady escalation of stakes and powers, simplistic -though sometimes touching- flashbacks are regularly used to give scenes more emotional impact, and the humor, which is very typical of its time, sometimes works well but sometimes feels very heavy. More importantly, almost all characters often act, think and speak in a simplistic or even silly manner, which I find to be the one of the major weaknesses of the manga.

The main character Sakuragi is extremely dense, hot-tempered and a bit of a delinquent, as a lot of shounen protagonists were in the nineties, but he is so naturally talented and has such an incredible learning speed that he quickly becomes a key player in his high school's basketball team. Rukawa, who is the ace of the team and another one of the most important characters, is rather boring and flat, other than the fact that he has a rivalry with Sakuragi which most likely inspired that of Naruto and Sasuke: the red-haired, hot-tempered guy with amazing potential wants to catch up to the apathetic, dark-haired genius. And that's about the extent of this manga's character writing. The characters mostly stay as they are for the entirety of the long story.

That is to say, Slam Dunk's character writing is quite weak. Even though Sakuragi and his teammates steadily grow as basketball players, they only ever change as persons on occasions that are so rare and sudden that they lack impact and feel artificial. The measly amount of character development the manga has to offer is therefore neither significant nor realistic. Where other shounen manga often rely on their characters to carry them in the long run, Slam Dunk's main cast lacks complexity and is not believable enough to stay interesting for 31 volumes. Some of the other characters like Akagi and to a lesser extent Kogure, Ryouta and Mitsui are much more likeable than Sakuragi and Rukawa, though they are also quite simplistic. The one thing that best managed to draw my empathy was actually the abstract but omnipresent entity of Shohoku (the name of the character's high school and team), which concentrates the passion and dreams of many, and thus has enough emotional weight to occasionally move a reader. As for the antagonists, when they are not ridiculously caricatural, they are about average. Not a single one of them is really interesting.

Slam Dunk's subpar characters, strong art and rather realistic depiction of basketball logically lead the reader to focus on the action, which thus constitutes the main interest of the manga. Regrettably, the weakness of the characters often bleeds onto the action itself. For instance, the way they speak during basketball games is quite unpleasant: they frequently shout across to their opponents and provoke them brashly, and their monologues are full of annoying ramblings about the importance of victory and their desire to be stronger. This kind of speech is fairly common in shounen manga, as the opponents are supposed to represent the inner obstacles that the characters have to overcome in order to grow, and as it further contextualizes the action, thereby raising its stakes. In Slam Dunk however, the caricatural personalities of the characters, the paucity and redundancy of the words they use and the recurrence of those passages make them feel tedious.

Another problem with the manga's action is the unnatural rhythm of its basketball games. They are almost systematically divided in sections in which one team tries to overcome a problem posed by the other team's way of playing. In order to do so, they need to implement a specific strategy that will either quickly succeed -in which case the section is generally entertaining-, or require a given player to surpass himself by mastering a new move or by managing to overwhelm his seemingly superior opponent. These moments, which can be found in most shounen battle series, are very frequent in Slam Dunk and extremely annoying, because they often include the aforementioned weak dialogues or flashbacks that interrupt the game and break its flow.
This unnatural rhythm strongly undermines the realism of the manga for the sake of cheap clichés and power-ups. Even worse, in order to create tension, several of those drastic changes in players' abilities often occur in the course of a single game and they are always accompanied by significant score gaps that are alternately bridged and widened by both teams.

Slam Dunk's length is its last weakness: the characters are not good enough for the emotional connection the reader builds with them over time to counterbalance the manga's repetitiveness; it makes elements that were funny, believable or dramatic in the beginning lose their effectiveness and ultimately feel unimpressive.

The ending of the manga is average, and so are the majority of the secondary characters such as Haruko, Ayako, Aota and the coaches: they are decent but basic, semi-effective in their role as comic reliefs, and are ultimately bound to stay underdeveloped spectators.

To put it in a nutshell, Slam Dunk is neither awful nor outstanding. It relies mostly on being purely about sports at the detriment of the characters, but despite its strong art, it doesn't really manage to excel in this domain due to a lack of realism that sometimes makes it hard to take seriously. Watching a real basketball game with real stakes, more consistent tension and actually interesting players is in my opinion a more interesting activity than reading this manga.

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Aug 16, 2020

erased_cydonian

Not Recommended

Preliminary (40/276 eps)

Spoiler

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

Characters (0/10):

-Sakuragi: He is your typical dumb yet overpowered protagonist who relies on convenient scenarios and his plot armor. The entirety of his character consists of a tall teenager boy who falls in love with every single girl he comes across, bullies everyone for comedy's sake and is really stubborn. So basically, he digs his heels in making up with some girl who likes basketball and then joins the basketball team just to flirt with her even though he knows nothing about basketball. Of course, once he's already in, he plays the role of the prodigy who doesn't even know how make ...

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The First Slam Dunk London Movie Premiere: special invite only event! PDlab - Aug 26	0 replies	by PDlab »» Aug 26, 12:55 PM
Who are your top five favorite characters? bucciest - Jul 28	13 replies	by Way2Gay4Me »» Aug 1, 7:19 AM
Poll: Slam Dunk Chapter 276 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) ClosedCX - Jun 8, 2011	109 replies	by Rockito »» Jul 26, 2:06 PM
Poll: Slam Dunk Chapter 117 Discussion Rasco - Nov 20, 2011	4 replies	by matt2003mom »» Jul 13, 2:43 PM
After Which chapter I can watch THE FIRST SLAM DUNK ? El_Professor07 - Jun 3	7 replies	by MichaelJackson »» Jul 3, 9:54 PM

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