“I Feel a Little Sorry For Them”

I’ve mentioned this before, but reading a baseball manga monthly is tough.  Especially an Adachi manga.  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find myself getting a bit impatient with the rate of development.  As a result a chapter like this one, devoted to the last inning of a practice match, feels a bit thin gruel – it’s not much to chew on for an entire month of waiting.

And that’s the problem, really.  Because that’s Adachi – he takes his time and develops his characters in an extremely subtle way, with the sports very much s supporting player to the human drama.  It doesn’t seem to be impacting Mix‘s prospects at all – it continues to be the top title in the magazine Weekly Shounen Sunday and easily break 200K in the first week with every volume.  And I’m glad – it’s a good series, certainly Adachi’s best since Cross Game (though I liked the sadly aborted Over Fence, too). Maybe it’ll be the first Adachi to get an anime since CG too, though not for a couple of years.

What we get here is modestly interesting, but let’s be honest – it’s certainly no surprise that Touma is a genius baseball boy, because if he wasn’t we wouldn’t have much of a story.  He manages to shut out Toushuu on two hits over 7 IP – no small feat, and exactly what Mita did in his first practice match as a first-year.  Of course while this happening, Mita is completing a perfect game against Meisei – finishing the job by striking out the Tachibana brothers in succession.  The funniest moment in the chapter comes when Natsuno-kun (remember him?) badmouths Mita’s little sister right to his face and nearly gets a punch in the face for it.

The headline, I suppose, is not that incest scenario but the one that matters – there’s a vibe between Otomi and the captain of the soccer club, Akai-kun.  This isn’t really incest, of course, as these two aren’t related – but Adachi has certainly hinted that these step-siblings might be the fated pair in Mix.  Like everything else in the series this plotline is still in the embryonic stage, but it’s one whose growth I’m interested to observe.