Girl Got Game

    (Tokyopop, 2004-2005)
™ and © Shizuru Seino
Reads right to left; b&w

Great title, great cover—if only the contents were half as good. Girl Got Game makes the classic manga mistake of predicating a multi–volume series on a premise that wouldn’t sustain a short story: Deranged Dad (he claims a torn Achilles tendon kept him out of the NBA; I’m guessing lack of height had something to do with it), which “naturally” leads his daughter Kyo to pass herself off as a boy, so she can join a prestigious boy’s high school basketball team and live in a dorm room with her on–court rival and would–be love interest.

Along with this painfully artificial foundation, the art’s a bit shaky. Obviously, a lot of work went into the beautiful main figures, but secondary ones are awkward, and the art fails to convince when depicting basketball action. The movie Bend It like Beckham managed to mine plenty of drama, comedy, and romance from girls’ sports without resorting to cross–dressing.

— S.A. Bennett
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