The Spring 2024 Manga Guide

Sketchy

What's It About? 

Ako finds herself coasting along, watching her twenties pass her by. Work at the video rental store, see her boyfriend, repeat... Her days are becoming an indistinguishable, listless blur. Until she encounters a skateboarder practicing a trick--and she's a girl! For some reason, Ako feels a pull toward the sport. Slowly, all the dreams and ambitions she gave up on and the futures she imagined for herself come flooding back, and Ako resolves to change herself now before it's too late. But is it ever really too late to discover something new?

Sketchy has a story and art by Makihirochi. English translation by Alethea Nibley and Athena Nibley. This volume is lettered and retouched by Evan Hayden. Published by Kodansha Comics (April 9, 2024).

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Is It Worth Reading?

Lauren Orsini
Rating:

Ako is a Millennial woman with a dirtbag boyfriend, a dead-end job, and a bunch of vapid school friends who only care about finding rich husbands. Time to learn to skateboard!

Sketchy is a powerful and, at times, painful portrait of what it feels like to be a woman in her 30s. Ako feels isolated from everyone around her, even her noncommittal boyfriend of multiple years. (One funny way the manga indicates that the boyfriend is Bad News is by making it clear that he thinks the widely lauded Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is a bad movie.) But after encountering a group of female skateboarders one evening, Ako realizes that her 30s don't have to be the end of something; they can be the beginning of something new.

Fans of Tokyo Tarareba Girls, especially those who appreciated that series' frank and sympathetic eye for women who aren't living their 30s according to plan, will appreciate Sketchy's loosely connected stories of Ako and the women around her, all dealing with different Millennial problems that somehow all lead them to try out the same beginner skateboarding class. Each character's problems can be messy (for example, one had an affair with a married client), but they all focus on the unrealistic belief that a 30-something woman ought to have everything figured out by now. The freedom, energy, and risk inherent in skateboarding help them find a way out of their head.

Peppered between the daily drama of Ako and her friends' lives are immersive scenes of Ako's skateboarding class. The beginner-level instructions gently nudge the reader into basic skateboarding and make skateboarding seem like a sport that anyone can try (in a way that the gravity-defying tricks of Sk8 the Infinity don't, as great as that show is)! To add to the approachability aspect, in between chapters, there are interviews with real-life female skateboarders in their 30s. The best part is when each athlete shares her most "Sketchy" moment, AKA something awkward or incongruous that happened to her.

Aside from its entertainment value and approachability, this manga's composition and line art create expressive, film-like tableaus. The first few pages feature Ako skateboarding on a tree-lined street, completely without words. With art like this, who needs 'em?

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

There's no real way to describe the feeling of suddenly realizing you've gotten older and stuck in a rut. It's a strange combination of depressing and awkward, a sense that while attempting to do what you're "supposed" to, life may have gotten away from you. That's the emotion at the heart of Sketchy, which takes adult angst and combines it with skateboarding in a story that is both relatable and wholly unexpected.

This volume is still in the set-up phase, but it's no less strong for that. We meet our ostensible three protagonists, women in their twenties and thirties who are struggling to figure out where they went "wrong," and maybe by whose measure things are "wrong." Ako, who looks to be the main character, is dating a pretentious wannabe writer who seems to spend his days saying how much he dislikes popular movies, with the strongly implied subtext that he dislikes them because they're popular. He doesn't want to move in with her, doesn't want to marry her, and even Ako seems to be figuring out that this may be a dead-end relationship. But she's already got a dead-end job at a video rental store, and one can only take so many realizations at a time.

Her epiphany comes when she sees a group of girls skateboarding. She's never seen any girls doing it, and she's fascinated, not just by the freedom and skill but also by the idea that skateboards don't require a penis to use. It's like that one glimpse of a lady on a board was the final strike that shattered preconceptions she didn't realize she had. The character dialogue around her and the other two women, Shiho and Takehana, supports that all three have been drowned in social ideas about age and femininity. Ako's high school reunion makes her feel insufficiently girly because she's not all dolled up, something one of her coworkers expressed as she was leaving work, too. Shiho's cousin makes comments about how, as a woman, she should have noticed that he needed her to pour him a beer, and Takehana is forced to take all the blame for an affair she had as if the man wasn't also a willing participant. When Ako's budding interest in skateboards generates similar sexist commentary, it becomes her/their rebellion against the world. Ako, Shiho, and Takehana will learn to do it because they won't be told they're "wrong" anymore.

Even if you know nothing about skateboarding or care about it as a sport, this is worth your time. It's a quiet rebellion against expectations of womanhood with art that's dynamic when it needs to be and a story that I suspect many of us will relate to.