It’s no secret that I’m an extremely lazy person; in fact, it’s a damn miracle that I haven’t dropped out of college considering my tendency to wait until finals week to do my homework. I’m even worse in the Summer. Due to my lack of academic responsibilities I spend an average of 12 hours in bed everyday.  But last week I managed to set a new precedent in apathy when I was too lazy to talk about my favorite Japanese cartoon–Baki the Grappler. Read the rest of this entry →

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In my senior year of high school I took a class called Minorities. It was a discussion based course on how certain groups of people have been oppressed in American history. We mostly talked about blacks, women, and homosexuals, but at the end of the course we shared our personal experiences with oppression. The class was taught by the school’s wrestling coach. His name was Mr. Bakke. The spelling may be different, but that doesn’t change the fact that one of my high school teachers was a real life Baki the Grappler. Read the rest of this entry →

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I’ve known about Keisuke Itagaki’s Baki the Grappler for nearly as long as I’ve been a fan of anime and manga. My first encounter was in issue 13 of the ill-fated Rajin Comics. My mom found it at the used book store and picked it up for me, knowing how much I loved “those Japanese comics.” Looking back, it wasn’t that impressive. There was a boxer named Takayama who hit himself in the face with a shot put because “a heavyweight champion’s punch hurts more than a shot put,” but it was mostly people talking about a fight that I had no context for. Regardless, I might have continued reading it, but I never saw another issue of Rajin Comics again. Read the rest of this entry →

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