Talking about the older and current generations of Jump is really becoming my niche, huh?

SLAM DUNK AND HAIKYU, A PROGENITOR AND ITS HEIR

Picture this. A Japanese Jump reader has picked up a 1990 issue of Weekly Shonen Jump, which apparently is launching a new series about a sport they'd never heard of. They read it...and are instantly mesmerized, for this is a series they'd never seen before.

This is Slam Dunk.

To understand the impact of Slam Dunk, it's important to go back and consider the situation with sports manga at the time. Sports manga is old, very old. It's the genre which was more or less the industry leader for shonen manga in the 60s and 70s, with tons of-

-stories about wide-eyed good boys who persevered through difficult matches to reach the top. They were light, simple affairs with rather generic artstyles, and were almost always about the national sport baseball, so the kid could relate to it.

Slam Dunk wasn't like that.

When Takehiko Inoue begun Slam Dunk, basketball was almost completely unknown in Japan, not even having a national team, and possessed a style far more realistic than its contemporaries. Most striking however was protagonist Sakuragi himself. A loud-mouthed ruffian-

-with a hairstyle as loud as his personality, Sakuragi was absolutely nothing like a typical protagonist and was most definitely NOT a "good Japanese boy", only getting into the sport on a stupid attempt to impress a girl he liked, and clashing with teammates constantly.

More critical however is that Sakuragi was not someone suited to basketball, his first attempt ends in humiliation. Like the readers of the time, Sakuragi was a complete and utter newbie to the sport, and that made discovering it a shared prospect.

With a completely new take on the sport combined with readers interest in something they'd never heard of, Inoue was free to let loose with his passion. He was a man who lived and breathed basketball, having played it himself in high-school, and this can be seen-

-in many ways, from the detailed depiction of what was in Japan an obscure sport down to even the shoes characters wore, to how many characters were modeled on real professional players. And that was the details which were overt. The energy of basketball, that hard-hitting-

-focus could be felt throughout every scene of the manga, a strong sense of emotion and determination that not only fit Jump like a glove, but created some of the most compelling drama readers had ever seen.

A new style, a new focus and a new emotion, THAT is what made Slam Dunk

And that paid off. In a time where Dragon Ball had quickly become the biggest thing in the world, Slam Dunk was the one series in Jump to rival it. It was a bonafide phenomena that sold millions of copies, and was big enough that, when it ended, Jump lost 2 MILLION READERS.

With that kind of impact, the question with Slam Dunk after it ended was "What the hell can replace it?". And Jump absolutely tried, with quite a few hit sports manga launching in the next three years. While a few of them (Rookies! and Hikaru no Go) had impact, they didn't enough

Then came Prince of Tennis.

Prince of Tennis is an...odd work to discuss. Depending on who you talk to, it is either a riveting story of young men's determination, or glorious shitpost which embodies every negative stereotype of sports manga, with very little in between.

Regardless of what you think, however, PoT was VERY successful, with an avid readerbase, both due to the excitement presented and the very large cast of handsome boys. Jump had found its new center sports manga, and that was enough, even if it lacked SD's emotional core.

After PoT was established, the rate of new sports manga joining Jump's canon was reduced dramatically, with the 2000s only seeing two significant series. The first, Eyeshield 21, was actually in many ways closer to the emotion focus of SD, but it's exaggerated aesthetic hindered-

-it from having the same impact. The second, Kuroko's Basketball, could be seen as an effort to marry the emotions of Slam Dunk with fangirl magnet appeal of Prince of Tennis and more or less succeeded, but its outlandish depiction of talent still made it unrelatable.

And that's the thing which had hindered all these new hits. While Eyeshield and Kuroko had plenty of emotion embedded in them, what they lacked was a down to earth base which made readers connect to them.

And so came Haikyuu, and delivered just that.

Haikyu stepped onto the playing field with one of the most exilerating beginnings a sports manga could possibly have. Shoyo Hinata, a kid who was determined to succeed in volleyball, was utterly crushed as he attempted a match against prodigy Tobio Kageyama, only-

-to be annihilated despite his best attempts. However, right as it seems like he'll have Kageyama as his rival, the twist comes; Hinata and Kageyama are going to be the same team.

There's a lot of aspects that go into making Haikyu such a universal kind of appeal-

-but a large amount of it is how, for the first time since Slam Dunk, Haikyu truly embodies the sport it is built around. Every page in Haikyu radiates a free-flowing energy, the panels reflecting their movements, with the emotions merging seamlessly with the action.

Additionally, Furudate doesn't stay rooted in the past, and brought in plenty of newer innovations to Haikyu. Haikyu's cast is enormous, with the main team of Karasuno having nearly entirely individual characters, and every rival team being given multiple developed-

-characters. There's an astounding amount of complexity and nuance to every character involved, and that, combined with some steller storytelling from Furudate, makes Haikyu a manga which appeals to everyone.

While My Hero Academia is widely agreed to mark the start of the modern era, I think the "true" first modern Jump manga is Haikyu. It's a series that, while no exactly original on the surface, is brimming with technique and meaning, and understands what worked with the past-

-and what needed correcting. It brims with confidence, and that confidence is what makes Haikyu the successor to Slam Dunk in my opinion, because it does away with all the faults while zoning in on the improvements.

There's one question, though - When is the next hit sport manga in Jump? To that, it's when another work on Haikyu's level appears. It's impossible to know when, or how. We just wait, for the legacy is destined to continue.

In the end, we can only fly higher.