Naoki Urasawa's Most Depressing Work — A Review of "Happy!"

Naoki Urasawa is often considered to be one of the greatest mangaka of all time. Yet his personal favourite of his own works — Happy! — remains incredibly obscure among English-speaking audiences. As far as I'm aware, I'm the first to make a video on it in English.

This video serves as a review of Naoki Urasawa's "Happy!", the second of his two sports manga. It serialized in Big Comic Spirits from 1993-1999 for a grand total of 254 chapters across 23 volumes. To date, it has sold over 18 million copies, albeit without any official English release. "Happy!" started serializing shortly after Urasawa finished his work on "Yawara!", which was a massive hit in Japan, largely due to its prime-time anime adaptation by Madhouse. When "Yawara!" was ending, Big Comic Spirits' editorial staff begged him to continue the story past its intended ending point, to which Urasawa adamantly refused. So they then requested that Urasawa do another sports manga with a female lead. And the end result was "Happy!", a much darker and more depressing sports manga intended for a more mature audience.

I structured my review of the series into two basic parts: what I liked and what I didn't. Though frankly speaking, I liked heck of a lot more than I didn't. So the second section is much, much shorter.

Time stamps:
00:00 Introduction and series premise
2:48 What I liked
12:19 What I didn't like

Music used:
Yawara OST 25 — 刹那編 もの憂げに・・・
Yawara OST 26 — 回想
Yawara OST 28 – ひとり海を見て

Special thanks to everybody who attended my panel on "The Works of Naoki Urasawa" back in May. And huge thank you to my amazing co-host, Cass, as well.