Corey Roberts Reviews Marvel’s Tennis Manga – “15 Love”
I bought all three issues of Marvel’s three-part series 15 Love hoping the manga comic was either a) nominally about tennis but mainly about teenagers having sex behind the ball machine, or b) completely about tennis and thus a legitimate reason for artist Tommy Ohtsuka to draw a bunch of otherwise illegal upskirt panels (note: my version of spell-check doesn’t recognize upskirt as a real word so I just added it to my computer’s dictionary—are you sure you want to keep reading?).
Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you’re not a van-driving Chester-in-training), writer Andi Watson leaves most of the salaciousness at the door and delivers an inside-the-lines story of a girl trying to improve her ranking at a tennis academy. Do I feel better for the world at large that there isn’t a comic out there about underage coke whores in tennis skirts? Mildly. Do I feel ripped off because I spent $16.43 on three comics because I thought they would be so creepy as to become ironic coffee-table conversation-starters only to later find out that the thing is about as edgy as an old episode of “Hey Dude”? Absolutely.
Most frustrating is all that the comic leaves on the table. The cover of the first issue promises much: a cartoonishly proportioned blonde swings a racket while her clothes hold on for dear life to her very detailed curves. The cover of the second issue features another girl looking slyly over her shoulder (at a potential lover? her vanquished opponent? her drug dealer? I can’t wait to find out!). However, the panels on the inside (with a few exceptions) are considerably muted compared to the cover and leave you mainly just reading stories that revolve around climbing the leaderboard, recovering from injury and securing sponsorships. By the end I was wondering if a bonus issue would ever be released on the topic of calibrating the radar gun and painting the lines on the court.
No way that’s a regulation uniform…
The characters themselves have enormous potential: a sneaky-hot good-girl; a top-ranked, bitchy queen bee; a washed-up, touped, John Candy-in-Cool-Runnings-esque tennis coach; his golden boy nemesis. If this were T.V. we’d be looking at multiple, loyalty-testing hook-ups. What happens when Good Girl falls prey to Golden Boy’s charms? When Queen Bee sucks off John Candy to make him sabotage Good Girl? When Good-Girl and Queen Bee have a lesbian encounter to boost ratings and stave off cancellation?
None of these questions are answered though (or even posed). The story is three issues long and the characters spend it talking and playing tennis and then disappear from our lives with all the ceremony of an ESPN2 match that’s pre-empted for NASCAR.
15 Love teases in the same way that real-life, hot tennis chicks do. It shows off; it teases; it makes you think you have a chance with it. But in the end you realize that if you two had a future together, it would have found its way into your van a long time ago.
Corey Roberts is a contributor to Geekscape.net. Any legal questions, criminal or otherwise, pertaining to Mr. Roberts as a result of this piece should be directed to the offices of Feldman, Gold and Stone, Van Nuys, CA.
