New Series Blitz Brings Chess to World of High Stakes Action Manga

Warning: Spoilers for BLITZ volume 1 (chapters 1-9)The best aspect of a new manga about chess is ironically that it doesn’t have much to do with chess. Volume one of BLITZ from Ablaze does, however, introduce a fun dynamic that gives a twist to another series about a different strategy game.

Originally published in Shonen Jump, BLITZ follows an unmotivated boy named Tom who ends up emphatically trying to join his school’s chess club to impress a girl named Harmony. Almost immediately, the first big challenge that Tom must overcome is to beat the chess club’s president who dislikes him, but that’s not what readers care about. It’s the fact that Tom loses Harmony’s lucky knight chess piece, which she gave to him for luck. While chess might be Blitz’s subject matter, the manga is much more focussed on its characters.

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Numerous matches of the world’s most famous strategy game transpire throughout the volume’s nine chapters by writers Harumo Sanazaki and creator Cédric Biscay, and illustrator Daitaro Nishihara. Yet, the manga restricts readers from actually seeing what’s happening on the chess board. Usually, sports manga take a detailed look at the mechanics of their respective sport, resulting in any small move being given an absurd amount of attention. But this dynamic is avoided in BLITZ. Instead, Tom experiences the “presence” of his opponents that manifest physically like winter winds. Or, the reader gets to see each player react to a specific move without actually knowing what just happened, which can minimize the importance of tactics.

Blitz is a Chess Manga Where Chess Takes a Backseat

The only hope that readers have is that the first volume takes a considerable amount of time detailing how each chess piece moves, suggesting that future volumes will do this with actual strategies. From the prospective of this as a volume, it would have been wise for the first nine chapters to have included at least one instance where a match is explored in great detail. Although this not happening in BLITZ could be perceived as the manga’s creators slowly building up to this, readers who specifically consume these types of sports manga might be turned off by the fact that BLITZ doesn’t comply with the genre’s most crucial aspect.

It’s even more ironic considering that chess master Garry Kasparov, who oversees and sponsors BLITZ, includes a statement in volume one where he mentions that this project is a unique opportunity for him to democratize chess, which is clearly important to him, especially when it comes to Japanese readers who tend to prefer Shogi. Wouldn’t it make sense to detail a sport you’re trying to get more people involved in as quickly as possible?

On the positive side, BLITZ does pleasantly flip the most intriguing dynamic from a similar manga about another strategy game – Hikaru no Go. But rather than a ghost haunting the hero and communicating with him as is the case in Hikaru no Go, an accident while wearing some sort of VR device causes Tom to espouse the skills and aura of Garry Kasparov himself. While it would have been beneficial for BLITZ to explore the mechanics of chess more, it is important to realize that this is only the first volume, and hopefully, there will be many more to come so that its creators can give readers the sports manga treatment to a wildly important game like chess.

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BLITZ volume one is available now from ABLAZE.