Baki The Fucking Grappler

Baki The Grappler is the best comic in the world. Probably. I can´t actually read most of it, because it´s in Japanese and my nihongo is only about good enough to translate certain key words - ´Danger!´ ´Victory!´ ´Guillotine Choke!´ - and I´ve never bothered to try figuring the rest out. Also, it´s criminally under-represented in the Manga-loving West - even though it runs to two seasons of 40-odd issues each, plus a softcore erotica special that I can´t quite bring myself to buy, it never gets more than a cursory mention in the sorts of histories of the artform that wet themselves over stuff like Barefoot Gen.

Not that it matters. Here´s the plot, condensed and as far as I can work it out: there´s this kid called Baki. He fucking loves fighting, and fights all the time. His dad's the best fighter in the entire world and a master of every single fighting style, and his half-brother - sired during the Vietnam war, by the looks of things - is a steroid-addled maniac. The first twenty or so volumes of the comic sort of skirt around this, and the artwork's still evolving, so those with limited cash/rucksack-space might want to skip them, because the best bit happens when they go to The Tournament.

This is what happens at the tournament: the 32 best fighters in the world - plus reserves - spend a combined total of about a thousand pages beating the shit out of each other.

Baki wins, obv.

But it's amazing. If you were brought up on Western comics, you're probably used to Batman throwing unrealistic roundhouses at thugs who contort like shop dummies - this does not happen in Baki The Grappler. Every panel's drawn with a sort of frightening devotion to muscular human anatomy - if I was a tedious Late Show panelist I'd probably call it homoerotic - and the imaginatively, horrible ways you could distort it if you were really good at hitting/strangling people. Favourite moments? How about the bit where Jack Hammer realises that the aikido master's using his strength against him, so he approaches really slowly and then bites through his forearm? Or the Russian wrestler bloke suplexing an anaconda? Or Baki's dad kicking a man in the groin so hard that it inverts his entire ribcage? It's absolutely astonishing, and all comics that aren't Baki The Grappler should be ashamed of themselves.

That is all.