Penning one successful series is hard enough, but following it up with another is even harder. No one will tell you this more than Tadatoshi Fujimaki: despite creating arguably one of the most influential sports series of the 21st century in Kuroko’s Basketball, his 2017 follow-up Robot x Laserbeam never took off in the same way. That being said, he may or may not have finally cracked the code with Kill Blue by adapting his formula for the current manga landscape.
It’s hard to understate the importance of Kuroko’s Basketball. While Slam Dunk by Takehiko Inoue arguably pioneered the “spoken” style of sports manga by slowing down time and having the narration recount each minute thought of the characters, Kuroko’s Basketball took this one step further by giving each character special abilities. This method of “shonenification” has been replicated both in Weekly Shonen Jump itself with such series as Haikyu! and Hinomaru Sumo, as well as outside of the magazine with Aoashi and Blue Lock.
Even so, that was more than fifteen years ago at this point. The manga industry, as well as the tastes of the manga-reading consumer, have changed greatly since then. Nothing exemplifies this more than Robot x Laserbeam: Fujimaki’s last series launched just three years after the conclusion of Kuroko’s Basketball. Despite more or less replicating that story’s entire formula, audiences simply didn’t respond. It ended up lasting for little over a year and producing only six collected volumes.
Kill Blue, on the other hand, has already surpassed Robot x Laserbeam in terms of both volume count and longevity. Currently serialised in Weekly Shonen Jump since April 2023, Fujimaki’s latest series follows legendary hitman Juzo Ogami as he’s stung by a mysterious wasp that turns him back into a teenager. Alongside the regular tribulations of middle school, he’s also forced to protect his friend Noren from various powerful suitors as her influential family implement a system whereby anyone who wins a “challenge” gets to be her fiance.
Just from that premise alone, it should be obvious that Kill Blue combines a number of plot elements from other popular series. There’s the age regression gimmick from Detective Conan, the assassin action from Sakamoto Days, as well as the need to maintain a secret identity from Spy x Family. What really makes this series stand out, however, is how Fujimaki skillfully balances these popular plot elements with his real passion: sports.
The first half a dozen chapters of Kill Blue are fairly normal. Juzo gets into a fake relationship with Noren to protect her from potential suitors, he ends up joining the Home Economics club after getting schooled by their leader, and even takes on a rival assassin in the form of Shin Kohamaze. You’d honestly be forgiven for forgetting that Fujimaki even wrote this: aside from his art style, there’s nothing here that really stands out as truly his.
Enter Tenma Tendo. Also known as the “Triple Threat,” he’s the star player for the baseball, soccer and basketball team, having taken all three to nationals in the past. Despite usually being the talk of the school, the news of Juzo’s relationship with Noren ends up pushing him out of the zeitgeist, and he’s not happy about it. Following in the footsteps of the other antagonists up until this point, he challenges Juzo to a duel - only this time, through the medium of sports.
Owing to Tenma’s athletic background, the bout that he suggests is nothing more than a simple game of futsal, but his skills make him a formidable opponent as he shoots with laserlike accuracy and ferocious power. Fujimaki even depicts Tenma as a lion staring down a mouse at one point: such is the level of difference in skill. Juzo and friends are only able to win in the end because Tenma sustains an injury and concedes the match, not willing to let a simple grudge jeopardise his future career, nor the chances of his various teams.
Regardless of how the conflict is resolved, Tenma’s introduction marks the beginning of a definite turn towards sports within the narrative. Not only does the next arc feature an antagonist who attacks by hitting a golf ball really hard, Juzo and Noren even face off against another wannabe challenger in a surfing competition. Fujimaki also just finished up writing an intense battle between the heroes and villains on horseback: sports and athleticism run through Kill Blue’s very DNA.
Even so, Fujimaki has been careful not to veer entirely into the sports genre. For every arc based around some sort of athletic activity, there’s been another steeped in high-octane assassin action: take the arc that introduced the main villain, Yoichiro Oka, for example. This particular part of the story saw Juzo and head of the disciplinary committee Shido Jumonji forced to trade blows in a cramped tour bus, take down a stealth jellyfish, and tangle with a woman in a fursuit.
While the fact that Kuroko’s Basketball is so beloved could have had an effect on Kill Blue’s success, the practice of combining sports with another genre has been proving popular in the wider manga landscape as of late. On the more extreme end, Blue Lock combines soccer with the mechanics of a brutal battle royale, while Blue Box uses badminton and basketball as a vehicle to tell its tender story about teenage love. Fujimaki has, consciously or not, tapped into this trend by combining something as out there as assassins and sports.
As times change, so do the tastes of consumers. Simply writing a stylized manga about basketball or golf isn’t going to cut it anymore: just look at the list of unsuccessful sports manga launched in Weekly Shonen Jump over the past decade that follow this model, from Neru: Way of the Martial Artist to Green Green Greens. Learning to adapt to the changes of the market is what makes a manga artist successful in the long run, so Kill Blue hopefully proves that Tadatoshi Fujimaki will be sticking around for a while yet.
You can read Kill Blue in English for free via VIZ Media’s Shonen Jump.
