If You Combined Azumanga Daioh with Initial D…

…Yukari would be the death of street racing. (Also the death of people.)

…Everybody’s favorite toy would be the rollacorolla.

…Osaka would try to block her opponent on corners by sticking her arms out.

Okay, I know there’s definitely better/worse ones out there. So now it’s your turn.

The Improved Character Art of Initial D

Initial D has always been ridiculed for its poor character artwork, though for a series like Initial D it doesn’t matter too much as long as the races are sweet and intense and there’s Eurobeat playing, real or imaginary.

However, upon actually viewing some of the recent chapters, I’ve noticed that over the course of many years the character artwork in the manga has become much better, though only in specific moments. And I think you know exactly what moments those would be, i.e. those scenes which are considered most important to Initial D.

Here’s Takumi from an early chapter.

Now here’s one from a later chapter where he’s just standing around talking.

Not so bad, right? He’s pretty similar to the one from many, many chapters back, so why would there be anythi-

WHOOOAAAAA! Apparently now when Initial D characters get to a car, their entire designs become 10x more intense. And really, if you look at when they’re NOT in a car, they look like the previous image. It’s only when there’s a race on the line that the character artwork makes this dramatic jump to match the quality of the racing.

It’s the kind of thing that tells you exactly what the artist and the fans care about most.

Aim for Mediocrity

There’s two new shows this season where the apparent premise is that the main characters do not strive to be the very best, like no one ever was. One of these is the moe-powered 25-minute mahjong commercial Saki, and the other is the latest Kyoto Animation cute girls fest about a high school band K-ON! While the titular Miyanaga Saki is simply a mahjong genius who has found a way to merely seem mediocre, and K-ON!‘s Hirasawa Yui is simply a no-talent clumsy girl who’s trying to find something she can sort-of kind-of do, both girls are clearly going for the same goal, which is to be okay.

While both shows are clearly aimed at otaku with their ensembles of adorable girls with relatively harmless personalities, I don’t think it’s necessarily a case of “otaku are afraid to succeed and that’s why these girls aren’t striving to be the very best!” How I personally feel about it is that it’s actually kind of refreshing to not have characters who are entirely about toppling their opposition in a given field. Even if the story turns out that way eventually (a likely scenario for Saki), the fact that it started out that way is pretty nice.

Also, Saki is basically Takumi from Initial D only with mahjong tiles instead of a AE-86 Sprinter Trueno.