| | |  | VIZ KIDS | Home » » » Crimson Hero, Vol. 1 | | | | | | | Product Promotions: | | | | | Description: | | Manga | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Mitsuba Takanashi | | Paperback:
| 192 pages | | Publisher:
| VIZ Media LLC | | Publication Date:
| November 29, 2005 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 1421501406 | | Product Length:
| 7.56 inches | | Product Width:
| 5.36 inches | | Product Height:
| 0.62 inches | | Product Weight:
| 0.39 pounds | | Package Length:
| 7.3 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.0 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.7 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.3 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 6 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 6 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 Try itNov 28, 2005
By M. Whelan
"Sweet"
Okay, so the way I read this manga is I read it in Shojo Beat, a magazine of manga being published in America. At first I refused to read it because I thought, "Ew, volleyball? A sports story? No way, Jose!" But then I was bored one day and decided to check it out and it was actually good! (One of the main reasons I refused to read it was because I thought the main character was too guy-like. Turns out, the person I thought was too guy-like WAS a guy... Hmmm...) But no, the main character is actually a girl and despite it being about volleyball, this is still shojo and doesn't absolutely FOCUS on volleyball action like you'd expect it to if it were shonen. The characters are still nice and the only reason I'm only giving it four stars is because the artwork is a little dodgy when it comes to faces and three-quarter profiles. But it IS a good story!
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Inspiring, and a nice departure from the usual shojo storylinesFeb 09, 2011
By GraphicNovelReporter.com
Nobara's life consists entirely of volleyball. No, that's not totally true. Lately, Nobara's life has consisted entirely of trying to play volleyball.
Nobara loves volleyball and is an excellent player who receives much praise. However, that doesn't go over well with her mother. Her mother has old-fashioned opinions of girls and how they should act: docile, quiet, pretty. Sports for girls? Never. Nobara has to fight against this ignorance, but since it's her own mother, there's not much she can do.
In fact, her mother does much more than quietly disapprove. She does what she can to get her daughter to quit the sport altogether. She even despises the fact Nobara has cut her hair so short she gets mistaken for a boy. Nobara's aunt doesn't act in a way her mother deems appropriate, so the aunt has been pretty much cut out of the family. Clearly, it's her mother's way or no way.
Things get even worse at school. The girls' volleyball team--which Nobara wanted to join so badly--has been disbanded. This happened in part because the team wasn't doing so well...and in part because her own mother used bribery to finish the team off. That's how much she doesn't want Nobara to take part in the game she loves.
Nobara tries to join the boys' volleyball team. Unfortunately, they won't let her join, so there's another dead end there. Things get worse at home and she ends up moving out. She tries to live with her aunt, the school's nurse, and instead gets a job as the dorm mother for the boys' volleyball team. Cooking and cleaning for volleyball players is definitely not what she wants in life. In the meantime, she's putting out flyers and trying to reestablish the girls' volleyball team.
A lot of shojo titles (though clearly not all) center around romantic themes. There's certainly nothing wrong with this, but it's nice to have a change of pace. There are some romantic elements in Crimson Hero (Nobara and a boy at her school clearly like each other), but the main plot is Nobara's gung-ho attitude about making her dreams come true. That's really great to see. She's a spunky, strong-willed character, the type I'd like to see more often in shojo titles. There are times when she gets really down, but she keeps going for her goal. In that sense, it's an inspiration to teens--and everyone else.
-- Danica Davidson
3 of 4 found the following review helpful:
Crimson HeroMar 13, 2006
By Christy J. Malloy
I absolutly love this this manga. It is the best one that I have ever read. I first read it in the magazine ShojoBeat that a frind of mine ownes. Out of all the different types of manga's in the intire magazine, Crimson Hero is my absolute favorite one. I can't wait till I get the rest of the series.
Thank you.
She is Woman Hear Her Roar!Sep 09, 2010
By Wherokee178
It's an awesome story to completely honest. It was the first sports manga I've ever read in my life and I was captivated with the story. So let me break it down for yah, Nobara is a girl whose the heiress to running a female tea hosting restaurant. But Nobara doesn't want that burden, all she wants to do is play volleyball, she's incredibly passionate about volleyball and will do whatever she can to get it up and running at the school she's now attending. Sometimes she gets mistaken for a boy, causing really cute humor when one boy (Yuushin) grabs her chest thinking she's a guy. So Nobara leaves her home when her mother pushes her too far and Nobara's aunt, a nurse at the school she's attending, decides to help her little niece out. Nobara is now the house mom for the male volleyball team. On top of tending to the boys, and scarring them for life with her underwear hanging up in the wash room, poor Nobara needs to put together a team so she can play. What's a girl to do?
And to make things a little more interesting it seems Haibuki, one of the boys from the team had a long time crush on Nobara.
Finally as Nobara gets a few hesitant team members she finds grafitti written on her painstakenly made posters, and the suspects are the male volleyball team. And so the first manga ends on a cliffy when Nobara challenges the boys' team to a volleyball match.
1 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Don't Be Scared Off By the Volleyball Focus--This Is a Solid Shoujo SeriesMay 31, 2008
By B. Calhoun
All tomboy Nobara Sumiyoshi wants to do is play volleyball. All her mother wants her to do is take her responsibility as eldest daughter seriously and put her dedication into taking over the family ryotei (a high class Japanese dining establishment). When Nobara discovers that the high school she entered has eliminated the girl's volleyball team due to low participation, she is upset. When she learns it was her own mother who suggested the girl's volleyball team wouldn't be missed and urged the school to disband it, Nobara is furious. She runs away from home and with the help of her Aunt Momoko (the school nurse) she ends up working for her room and board as dorm mother for the dorm where the volleyball recruits live--and since the only volleyball team still around is for guys, the dorm is all-male. Although she must deal with rude dorm members such as the brash Yushin Kumagai and the lack of enthusiasm among her classmates when she tries to restart the girl's volleyball team, Nobara refuses to give up until she succeeds at her dream of playing volleyball.
I have no real interest in volleyball in real life or on the page and I don't like sports manga in general (who wants to read five pages of a character hitting a ball?) so I was a bit wary of picking up CRIMSON HERO. I decided to try it because I have in general been satisfied with the Shoujo Beat line and I'm glad I decided to give this series a shot! While it is about volleyball--because that's what heroine Nobara is obsessed with--it's more about the typical shoujo manga theme of relationships (including not one but two romantic interests for Nobara). The art is also really good, although sometimes the guys look like girls (I honestly thought that Yushin was a girl the first time I saw him, and was wondering why he was in a guy's uniform). Nobara also has a habit of looking like a feminine guy with her short hair and often baggy clothes (refusing to wear her school's sailor uniform doesn't help). However, once I adjusted myself to the fact that it is often distinguish the males from the females it didn't bother me.
I've read several subsequent volumes of this series and have remained quite satisfied. This is a good shoujo series and even those not interested in sports manga should enjoy it (because in the end it really is more shoujo than sports oriented).
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