Manga: Blitz

By Shelley Pallis.

Teenager Tom is determined to impress Harmony, the queen of the class at his school, and the only way he can do so is by beating her at chess… which he first has to learn how to play. What could possibly go wrong? So begins Blitz, a light-hearted manga introduction to the greatest of games, written by Cedric Biscay and Harumo Sanazaki and drawn by Daitaro Nishihara.

A brief afterword by grandmaster Garry Kasparov discusses the possibility of introducing the Japanese to chess through manga, amazingly revealing that of all the subjects covered in manga form, chess itself appears to have been bafflingly neglected. One wonders about the graphical reasons for this – as Nishihara’s artwork soon reveals, it’s tough indeed to dramatise a game with 32 pieces and 64 squares, when, depending on their skill levels, readers are either entirely clueless about what the horsey thing needs to do, or can divine all the drama and action in a match from a simple representation of the board, which would make a manga framework redundant.

Blitz luxuriates in the place chess can occupy in the modern world – a friendly game between old men in a park, or a high-stakes match for big money, and all the points in between. Tom gets to experience chess as a school hobby, and as a private mental exercise, but also as an online community, where he can pit himself against everybody from novices to champions. For some reason, the first volume of the manga also comes accompanied by five-page essay on cultivating “intuition” by someone called Alexis Champion, which somewhat hobbles any message that the manga might have had regarding training one’s mind, because Champion thinks you can win by trusting in the Force, or something. In fact, it’s a bit odd that a relatively innocent, fun manga like Blitz should come barnacled with so many afterthoughts that have little to do with chess itself.

Kasparov is a character in the manga, summoning the youth of the world to a chess tournament, which Tom is sure to dive into… presumably after he has learned some kind of magical thinking to make him the world’s greatest chess prodigy. Blitz gains another Japanese co-writer from its second volume onwards, making me suspect that its writing team is still experimenting with ways to adequately express the multi-dimensional, deeply historicised drama accompanying something so deceptively simple as moving a Pawn to King 4. You can present an image of the whole board; you can allegorise it as knights in armour whacking each other on a checkered plain; you can cut away to whispered commentary… all tricks and tropes tried in many a sports manga before Blitz. But unlike, say, baseball or soccer, getting your head around chess requires some idea of how 32 pieces might perform in multiple possible configurations that literally outnumber the atoms in the universe, so it’s a bit of a steep learning curve from a first volume that has to explain the difference between knights and rooks.

Tom’s quest to impress Harmony hence carries a lot of dramatic weight, while there are hints in the storyline that the authors are interested in multiple angles beyond chess, including Champion’s brain-training sales-pitch, and the implications, as witnessed in a stand-off between Kasparov and the ominously named chess computer kaiju96, that artificial intelligence is about to take chess, and the world, to a whole new level.

Blitz is available through Azuki.