Real Review

Inoue made his name with Slam Dunk and then spent decades on a basketball manga that is its opposite: quiet, adult, and about what happens after the body fails. Real follows a school dropout who injured a girl in a motorcycle accident, a promising sprinter who loses his leg to cancer, and a basketball star paralysed in a crash, and it gives each of them the time a weekly manga never could, because Inoue publishes it only when he is ready.

The art is the finest of his career, with a photographic realism in the bodies and faces that makes the physical struggle legible on every page. The wheelchair basketball is drawn as a real sport with real tactics. What the manga is about is dignity, and it earns the word. Its only flaw is its pace: fifteen volumes in twenty five years, with gaps of years between them, which asks a patience most readers will not have. Those who do get one of the medium's masterpieces.