The Spring 2024 Manga Guide

Initial D Omnibus

What's It About? 

Takumi Fujiwara spends a lot of time behind the wheel. His tofu delivery job sends him racing down Mount Akina's treacherous roads; without even realizing it, Takumi has mastered racing techniques that take most drivers a lifetime to learn. Of course, none of his friends realize this. They're all too busy watching the Akina Speed Stars, the local street racing team. When the legendary Red Suns show up to challenge the Speed Stars, the rival team obsesses over a phantom car, the Trueno Eight-Six, seen racing through the mountain roads. Who is the driver, and will they take on the dangerous challenge?

This edition is still running in the '90s but features a refreshed translation and lettering for the 2020s and a special large size.

Initial D Omnibus has a story and art by Shūichi Shigeno, with English translation by Kevin Steinbach. Scott O. Brown lettered this volume. Published by Kodansha Comics (March 19, 2024).

Is It Worth Reading?

Initial D is one of those series where I can understand why people love it, but it emphatically isn't for me. I realized this midway through the newly translated omnibus when I wished that Itsuki would just shut up about racing and Takumi's car for a bit so that we could find out what was going on with Mogi and the terrible situation she's gotten herself in. On the one hand, Mogi engaging in compensated dating at best and sex work at worst (and my money's on the latter) while still in high school is objectively more harrowing than a bunch of dudes racing cars down a mountain. Conversely, we're meant to be much more invested in the racing than Mogi's issues, so I was reading for the wrong plotline.

Still, it's hard to deny that this book loves its cars and racing, and it also does a very nice job of making things tense for the readers. The character art might charitably be called “unattractive.” Still, the amount of loving detail that goes into the vehicles' exteriors is impressive, and even if you don't know your chassis from your gear shift, you can quickly tell the different makes and models just by looking at the images. I also apparently absorbed a lot more about cars from my father's love of the Click and Clack show on NPR than I thought, and I am very grateful that he taught me to drive a standard because even knowing just a little bit about cars and how they work increases the enjoyment of this tenfold. If my admittedly baseline knowledge helped, I can only imagine how amazing this would be if you knew a lot about cars and drag racing. Fortunately, there is an extensive glossary in the back, and that goes a long way towards making things more accessible to the casual reader; in fact, I'd recommend reading it before you start the actual manga if you're not up on your 1990s car information.

Having not read the previous English translation, I can't speak to how this differs. It reads smoothly and doesn't feel dated except when specific vehicular knowledge is brought in, though, so I'm inclined to say it's good. Being from thirty-odd years ago, some elements are unpleasantly striking, such as the boys' attitudes towards and comments about girls and their clothing, but those do contribute to the Mogi storyline and offer hints as to why she's doing what she's doing; the story's world seems to only be interested in women in a sexual way, at least so far. It also really enjoys men leaning insouciantly against virtually anything that can be leaned on, which is amusing.

Initial D holds up surprisingly well, given how far removed we are from its initial publication. It has its issues (the art chief among them), and it will almost certainly be more fun if you're into cars and/or racing. But it isn't bad even if you aren't, and it certainly feels like one of those series that you ought to have at least a little familiarity with the landscape of manga history.

I was not an Initial D fan before I picked up this review copy, but I am now. It turns out that this '90s to '00s vintage manga has a huge cult following for a reason. I can tell that it's a classic because I kept reading it and thinking, "I've seen this kind of thing before; how derivative!" before realizing that this was probably the originator of those tropes in the first place. Plenty of modern sports manga have cribbed material from this illegal street racing story.

Our protagonist is Takumi, a space cadet of a gas station attendant who doesn't even know what kind of car an Eight-Six is. (It's a kind of Toyota Corolla made in the '80s; only gearheads refer to it by its model code!) Although Takumi has seemingly no interest in racing, it turns out that his ex-racer dad has been training him (and tuning the car's engine) for years. Like many sports manga protagonists, Takumi has a secret power, except in this case, it's simply "breaking the law:" his dad had him do deliveries for their tofu shop years before he got his license. To get the chore over with faster, Takumi learned how to drift. It all comes to a head when Takumi asks to borrow the car so he can take his (literal sex worker) girlfriend to the beach. Dad says sure, but only if Takumi can beat the Red Suns, Gunma's fastest team, in an illegal downhill race! (Obviously, Initial D has a very tenuous relationship with not only the law but reality!)

What I wish I had done as soon as I picked up Initial D was flip back to the glossary, which is certainly extensive. I do not know much about cars or driving, so I wasn't always sure how to react to the manga's word salad of engine types. For example, when a man in a GT-R challenges Takumi to a race, I was supposed to think Takumi had no chance. Maybe I would have if I knew that was short for a Nissan Skyline (well, I don't know the significance of that car either, so maybe not). Every auto reference is explained in detail in the back of the book. That said, I'm not going to give high praise to a manga that requires literal homework to understand (well, either that or an existing passion for '90s cars). This is probably why Initial D has not caught on further: it has a high barrier to entry.

Still, I found the actual racing scenes wildly suspenseful, even if I knew zilch about cars. The detailed illustrations convey motion well, so you can get an idea of how quickly these cars zoom down Gunmna's suicidal mountain passes. I do want to put in a content warning for Takumi's girlfriend, who we see nude and who literally is having sex for money with a sugar daddy who has one rule: no boyfriends. I'm not too worried about how Takumi fares in the much-telegraphed GT-R race that serves as this volume's cliffhanger, but I am concerned about what happens to him when his girlfriend's chickens come home to roost.