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 81,923 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #6²

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

Popularity: #51

Members: 181,843

Favorites: 16,829

Resources

Wikipedia

9.08

Ranked #6Popularity #51Members 181,843

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 won the 40th Shogakukan Manga Award in the Shounen category in 1994. As of 2017, over 170 million copies of the series are in circulation. The manga's wide success led to a large increase in the popularity of basketball among 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, VIZ Media purchased the publishing rights and 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.

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Related Entries

More characters
Characters

Sakuragi, Hanamichi

Main

Mitsui, Hisashi

Main

Miyagi, Ryouta

Main

Rukawa, Kaede

Main

Akagi, Takenori

Main

Sendou, Akira

Supporting

Mito, Youhei

Supporting

Anzai, Mitsuyoshi

Supporting

Akagi, Haruko

Supporting

Ayako

Supporting

Reviews

Oct 16, 2024

raviwe

Recommended

“Dou Ahou”—how have you not read Slam Dunk yet?

In all seriousness, while I wouldn’t go as far as to call it a masterpiece, Slam Dunk is undeniably a cornerstone of manga, standing alongside classics like Dragon Ball Z and Berserk. For anyone curious about sports manga, this is a must-read.

With that said, let’s dive into Slam Dunk—its themes, structure, and how it holds up as a shōnen classic. We’ll also touch on whether its beginning is misleading and how it contributes to the genre’s legacy.

So, what is this manga about?

Slam Dunk is, at its core, about basketball. It may not delve as deeply into profound ... themes, but it perfectly embodies the spirit of Shōnen Jump’s motto: “friendship, effort, and victory.” While its execution may not make it an undisputed masterpiece, its importance in shaping the sports manga genre—and shōnen as a whole—is undeniable.

First things later, let’s talk art direction.

Inoue is a genius. While his art doesn't immediately shine as brightly in the early chapters, it's already solid and serves the grounded, realistic tone of the narrative. As the series progresses, Inoue's artistic talent blossoms, immortalizing key moments with stunning, grandiose illustrations that capture the emotional intensity of the story.

So, how does it start?

The foundation for everything that follows is set in the initial chapters. The art improves as the series goes on, and the focus shifts more toward basketball as the non-sports-related moments fade into the background. That said, the early chapters are a solid representation of what’s to come in terms of character dynamics and narrative style.

What about the characters?

There’s a kind of magic in how Inoue develops his main characters by delving deeper into the people around them, whether they’re rivals or teammates. The mental aspect of the game, and the characters' personal growth, is seamlessly intertwined with the basketball narrative, adding layers of depth that elevate the story.

What about the story itself?

The structure is what you'd expect from a sports manga—mostly training and matches. However, what makes Slam Dunk stand out is the emotional stakes and the way Inoue captures the highs and lows of competition, making every game feel pivotal and every victory or loss resonate deeply with the reader.

Then, what did I think of it as a whole?

Slam Dunk is a staple of both Shōnen Jump and the sports manga genre. I highly recommend it to anyone. It’s an intense and enjoyable read, and it’s surprisingly effective at getting readers invested in basketball, even explaining some of the game's basic concepts along the way.

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Oct 10, 2024

hxnyeol

Recommended

Tensai Basket man Sakuragi
The toll of freedom is the weight of responsibility, if that's the case then: Sakuragi has the wings to extend, but is bound to his duties. the blazing passion is a result of his drive to excite and keep Shohoku High school on court while being peculiar and comical. chef's kiss!
He plays a vital role in juxtaposing the temperament and the morale of his team and succeeds to lighten the serious demeanor of High school Basketball, Witness basketball moves introduced by a rookie and the rough path of learning them in such a short span, the character growth is sporadic ...

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Oct 8, 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: 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 series.

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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Lets Make Slam Dunk Youtube take over AniTube ShohokuTensai - Jan 14	3 replies	by TensaiSid »» Jan 18, 8:36 AM
Poll: Slam Dunk Chapter 23 Discussion Rasco - Nov 6, 2011	5 replies	by a0i-kun »» Jan 7, 8:22 PM
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Poll: Slam Dunk Chapter 97 Discussion Rasco - Nov 18, 2011	13 replies	by k0rvus »» Dec 10, 2024 5:51 PM
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