With the end of chapter 31 of Kawada’s Martial Master Asumi, and what seemed like the end of the series’ first act, I was excited to write a little bit about what I saw as one of the most promising new series in the magazine. But, as I often do, I fell a bit behind and found myself with only a couple of paragraphs written before chapter 32 hit (I can’t believe I used to get out reviews on a weekly basis way, way back in the day). I weighed whether I wanted to finish the article before reading the new chapter – keeping my thoughts contained to said first act – or peek ahead a little bit, and ultimately decided to go ahead and read the latest chapter.
Chapter 32, it turns out, was the final chapter of Martial Master Asumi. The first act that had me excited about what was to come was, in fact, the only act.
Perhaps the writing had been on the wall for more industry-savvy readers. I never paid too much attention to the unofficial “rankings” (i.e. the order of the series in the printed magazine), and my ear is very much not to the ground when it comes to manga news. I’ve had series I like be abruptly canceled before – whether in American comics or manga, that’s always a possibility with serialized comics – but I like to think I normally have a pretty good handle on reading the cues of “ah, they’ve been told to wrap it up.” This is the first time in a long while that a comic series I’ve really enjoyed has sucker punched me (pardon the pun) with an ending I didn’t know was coming until the final chapter, and I can’t lie, it’s a bad feeling.
Despite the unwelcome ending, I said I was going to write about Martial Master Asumi, so here I am. I’m not making a petition to bring back a canceled series or anything like that – what’s done is done, especially when it comes to an (apparently) commercially unsuccessful series. – but I think it was a neat series, and a cut above most of the other regular offerings in Weekly Shonen Jump.
On its surface, Martial Master Asumi has many of the common tropes of shonen sports manga. Nito is a decidedly average highschooler – perhaps much like You, the target demographic of Shonen Jump! – without much ambition. When his friend, Fuchida, tries to get Nito to join the school MMA club, Nito is originally uninterested until he runs into Okiba, a girl in his school who is an MMA diehard. Of course, we soon learn that not only is Nito a natural at MMA, but his senile grandfather is a martial arts genius and his older brother, Kazuro, is an MMA star (and a bit of a bad boy). Outsider to the sport, latent talent, secret connections, originally only interested in a girl – we’ve seen all of these before, time and time again, and I originally thought the series was going to be a dud because of that. And yet, within the first few chapters it quickly moved up in my opinion from something to read to something special.
As is often the case with comics that seem plain from a basic description, one of the reasons Martial Master Asumi is better than it might sound is the art, and especially Kawada’s visual storytelling. What at first seems like a style more suited to a simple high school comedy suddenly bursts with raw physicality the second a punch is thrown. It’s a cliché in comic reviewing (well, in my comic reviewing at least), but you can feel every blow as it connects and the overwhelming pressure of each grapple. Even though Kawada also relies on a somewhat common visual trope – the near-demonic countenance Nito acquires when he gets pumped up in a fight – it’s sold so well that it doesn’t matter if it’s something that’s been seen before. The reader truly gets the impression that Nito is having the time of his life, and if that’s a little scary then perhaps it should be (he is beating the bejesus out of other people, after all).
One of MMA’s strengths as a spectator sport is that an observer doesn’t necessarily need to know much about combat sports to follow a match. To someone not versed in the ins and outs of MMA, there remains the primal appeal of watching two people slugging it out. For this reason, an MMA-based series could very easily just be another shonen fighting manga masquerading as a sports manga, where the techniques border on the fantastical and the finer points of the sport are reduced to a vague sense of “I need to get stronger.” But Kawada is a true enthusiast of combat sports and wants to share that enthusiasm with the reader. Like any sport, MMA has depth to it that isn’t immediately perceptible to the untrained eye, and one of Kawada’s goals with Martial Master Asumi is to show that there’s more to MMA than just a couple of meatheads punching each other.
This also, on its face, isn’t particularly unique to Martial Master Asumi; there are many sports manga that partially serve as introductions to the sport they feature. What Martial Master Asumi accomplishes better than many of its peers is how Kawada incorporates its didactic elements into the visual storytelling. The risk with any comic that is meant to inform as much as entertain is that it can become dry and overly wordy. In some ways it’s very similar to the modern trend of fantasy shonen fighting manga that gets too up its own ass about explaining the super cool magic/spirit/energy/whatever rules the mangaka has invented. With Martial Master Asumi, Kawada demonstrates an exquisite sense of tempo: we get a few words explaining what’s going on, followed by a visual payoff, some more explanation, then another payoff (this, obviously, is enhanced by the fact that Kawada’s fight scenes pack heft, as previously mentioned). Where a similar mangaka might have me rolling my eyes a bit and going “I get it” as they spend too much time describing the intricacies of their sport of choice, Kawada has me on the edge of my seat. I don’t just get it, I see.
There isn’t much to say about the final chapter, to be honest – or at least not much that is fair to Kawada. Kawada seems to have wisely decided to give Nito’s match with Kuronuma the breathing room it needed rather than rush through to free up another chapter or two for the conclusion (partially why the ending was such a surprise, since it wasn’t flashing many of the warning signs I’m used to at this point). As such, the final chapter mostly exists to hint at some of the plans Kawada might have gotten to had the series lasted longer. It isn’t a satisfying ending, but how could it be? Perhaps the one thing I can fault Kawada for here is the literal sidelining of Okiba, who appears in the background in a single panel of this chapter. This is all the more disappointing because one of the many pleasant surprises of Martial Master Asumi was how well fleshed out Okiba was. Despite Nito originally getting into MMA because he thought Okiba was cute, she is given nearly as much glory in the ring as him, and her intense drive to be the best is maintained rather than relegating her to solely support Nito. With that in mind, surely something could have been done to at least acknowledge Okiba’s accomplishments in the final chapter. Obviously, page space is limited, but surely that would have been more satisfying than some light teasing at Baku Asumi’s history that will never be resolved.
Cancellation is always a looming threat for both creators and fans of serialized storytelling, and in manga especially that threat can come crashing down with little to no warning. Unfinished works are hard to recommend even in cases of artistic geniuses, and as much as I enjoyed Martial Master Asumi I don’t think I’d go that far in my praise of Kawada. Still, I think there’s still something of value to be found in this series after the fact, particularly as a demonstration of how to deftly blend action and education in sports manga for either students of the artform or comic enthusiasts. Here’s hoping that Kawada’s next series is as much as a knockout (groan) commercially is Martial Master Asumi was in quality.
