Holiday Review #4: DOGSRED

There was one more notable shonen sports story from a familiar creator this year, albeit one of more recent fame and a far cooler sport.

DOGSRED (Doggusureddu), by Satoru Noda.  First published in 2023 and first published in North America in 2025.

PLOT:

Rou was on the verge of greatness.  Despite losing his mother in a car accident, Rou Shirakawa managed to win the national figure skating championship...until he immediately lashed out in an angry tirade afterwards.  With no parents or career prospects, there's nothing for him or his twin sister Haruna to do but live with their grandfather in a small town in Hokkaido.  A chance encounter with a local bully leads to Rou accidentally sinking the local kids' hockey net, and the only way to get a replacement is for Rou to join the local middle school's hockey team for a single match before they (and the school) are shut down for good.  Now Rou has to figure out how to adapt his figure skating skills to a sport he barely understands how to play.

STORY:

Dogsred is the latest in a long line of sports fiction about down-and-out teams fighting their way to victory against all odds.  In a way, that's the story of the manga itself, as it's technically a remake of a short-lived hockey manga Satoru Noda created before Golden Kamuy.  In that sense, both the manga itself and its protagonist were given a second chance, and I'll be damned if the results aren't charming.

I was curious to see how Noda would adapt to working on a modern sports story after spending so much time on the historical intrigues of his big hit.  Admittedly, he's not straying too far from his comfort zone by setting this series in his beloved Hokkaido.  You can tell he really loves that place because he went so far as to set this series in a real Hokkaido town, incorporating actual buildings and landscapes in and around it.  He even credits these places, institutions, and schools in the back for their permissions and assistance with his research.  If nothing else, you can't say that this man didn't do his research.

In contrast to all those real-world details, the cast itself is kind of broad.  A lot of them feel like the simple archetypes you tend to find in sports fiction like this - the bully rival, an older mentor, the tiny sidekick/future friend who is there to explain things to the protagonist (and the audience in turn), etc.  Rou himself is an interesting mix of frustration, curiosity, and cockiness, a mix that feels right for a teen boy with some degree of talent and maybe a little too much ego for his own good.  I do hope that later volumes will get more into his relationship with his snarky twin sister Haruna, as late in the volume we learn that she was a figure skater too but their mother couldn't afford to support both their careers and that Rou might still be harboring some guilt over that.  Yet it all manages to wrap up in such a way that the series could have ended at this single volume and it would have been a satisfying conclusion.

Noda also does justice to the spr.  Again, he clearly put a lot of effort into it, as he credits a number of Japanese ice hockey federations for his research.  Rou being a total newcomer to hockey gives Noda all the cover he needs to explain the rules to his audience, and for the most part these explanations don't go on so long that it throws off the pace of the story.  I will say he gets dangerously close to it at times during Rou's first game, and I hope this will become less common once he covers the basics of hockey.  Thankfully, it's all balanced out with a good deal of humor.  Unlike a lot of sports fiction, Noda isn't afraid to let Rou look ridiculous and fuck up, and that goes a long way towards humanizing him and the story as a whole.

ART:

While the story of Dogsred doesn't bear much resemblance to Golden Kamuy beyond its general setting, it does bear some resemblance visually.  While it's not as blatant as that time Hiromu Arakawa recycled her FMA designs for Hero Tales, it's not hard to miss that there are a lot of faces (and facial features, particularly the heavy, squared-off eyes and eyebrows) that resemble notable characters from that series.  Most of the characters in this series are meant to be teenagers, but the majority of them look at least a decade older (if not more) and it distracted me every time I remembered that.

That being said, where Noda really excels as an artist with this series is with the skating.  Through the artful use of blurs, intense low-angle perspectives, and snappy paneling he manages to convey the intensity of Rou's skating as well as the speed and power of the hockey game.  So long as you can get past everyone's faceshield going partially transparent all the time (for the sake of actually being able to see their faces during the match), it's good stuff.

RATING:

Even if you're not normally a hockey fan or a sports manga fan, there's a lot to like about Dogsred.  It's got all the character, humor, and sincerely love of Hokkaido that he's known for combined with some genuinely good skating and hockey action.  Satoru Noda didn't just remake his old series - he truly made it better.

This manga is published by Viz.  This series is ongoing in Japan with 6 volumes available.  3 volumes have been released and are currently in print, and all chapters are currently being serialized via the Shonen Jump app.

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