Review: Blue Lock 1-10

 Boen is a huge soccer fanatic, so I tried to find him a comic book that has soccer that he'll like. Blue Lock came up repeatedly as a good comic, so I picked it up for him.  He didn't want to read it though, so I ended up reading it.

The concept is a Hunger Games style selection game, in which a coach hired by the Japanese soccer federation promises to produce a winning striker. The idea is to start with 300 players and through a process of elimination ultimately produce a winner.

There's some social commentary about how the typical Japanese person is too communitarian and not egoistic enough, and the training/selection program is supposed to encourage egoism. The training is not very realistic, as there's nearly no downtime and any athlete training this hard and playing this many games is likely to become injured. But that's par for the course for these types of stories --- realism is not the point.

The story starts out with some very basic selection and setback stories, with each player focusing on his specialty and trying to evolve it against other players. The primary story is about player position and seeing into the future, and the games are rarely a full 11x11 soccer game. Slowly the comic series introduces character interaction and history, to give a bit more flavor rather than just soccer action.

I'm not sure I can consider this series a really good one. But maybe if Boen watches the anime it'll be something he'll enjoy.