Happy!

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Two early and popular works of Urasawa Naoki. The character designs are basically the same...They both feature heroines involved in sports and male character(s) playing important role supporting them. Yawara! is more about romance, while Happy! is more about life and the sport. 

In the later matches in Happy!, you could see Joe's fighting spirit, especially the final battle... 

They're both about a poor but talented girl, who alone raises her younger siblings and overcome challenges to succeed in their respect fields. Both manga heavily focus on the protagonist and her development throughout the story. At the beginning Act-Age feels like a vanilla version of Happy!, there's not nearly as much suffering and struggle, however it soon takes his own identity. While Happy! is about overcoming external problems, most of the conflicts in Act-Age are internal, they're both interesting on their own right. 

Both series are written by the same author. Due to this the art (very well done in my opinion) looks alike in both series. If you like the way Naoki Urasawa tells a story and you like the general atmosphere of his stories than you should really read Monster. In my opinion Monster is by far his best work. It is the most deep and well written story I ever read. A must read for every manga fan in my opinion. 

On the surface, they look like completely different series, but they have the same feel when you're reading them. Where Skip Beat focuses on an actress, Happy focuses on a tennis player.. but otherwise, there's just less romance and a bit more nudity. If you enjoyed Glass Mask and Skip Beat, you'll probably like this one, too. 

What's with manga and debt? One has a main character with a debt of a hundred fifty million yen that was tossed on to him by his freeloading parents and he gets to be a butler in a love comedy. While the other manga has a main character with a debt of TWO hundred and fifty million that was due to a brother's incompetence and she gets hounded within an inch of her life unless she makes the tennis pros in this sports manga. I guess the moral of this recommendation is to either be wary of your Japanese family members, or if you're in debt, it's better to be the pretty boy butler than the pretty girl tennis prodigy.  read more