It's Nibras, not Nebraska: "Life Goes On... Get Real."

It's fantastic, it's realistic, it's real.

It's a bit rare to find a manga with the theme of disability, in fact, this is the first manga I've ever read that's involving disability.

REAL ( リアル Riaru) is mainly focusing on wheelchair basketball, the main characters are consisting of three young lads with different stories but, the three of them have the same desires, which is playing basketball. First is Nomiya Tomomi who is haunted with guilt after having an accident involving a girl that later on become disabled because of the accident and Nomiya felt that he is the one who must take responsibility because of what happened.

Then Nomiya's life changed when he met Kiyoharu Togawa, a former sprinter in his school years but then stopped because he diagnosed osteosarcoma (bone tumor) and ended up amputated his leg to avoid the disease to spread through his body. In this manga, the wheelchair basketball scenes are mainly involving Kiyo-chan and his wheelchair basketball team called the the Tigers.

The last one is Nomiya's former basketball mate named Hisanobu Takahashi, I guess he's some kind of a person who always judges others by 'ranking' them. He ranked himself as an A rank I suppose because he considered himself as a student who receives top grades in everything and popular and so on and so on.

In short, he has a really high ego.

But then his life changed after an accident that caused several of his spinal chords to be damaged.

And he discovered some things that has been missing from his past.

Kiyoharu (left), Nomiya (middle), and Hisanobu

I would say that this manga only has a little part for the basketball and wheelchair basketball, I guess it's more of a slice of life manga. Then Inoue-san also doing a really great job in the characters development, he's just found a whole new way of storytelling (claps for Inoue-san). Don't forget the detailed line art which really makes this manga so realistic.

Based on this article, Inoue-san said: “Every one of us has drama. Any character can be a strong character once you shed light on them. Once you let the characters create their own drama, it will always lead to an interesting story,”

-oOo-

So... it is left with only Vagabond that I haven't read yet. I'm not particularly interested in Samurai stories though (yes, although I'm a fencer who really is obsessed with swordsmanship and all those stuffs) but I bet Vagabond is also one of Inoue-san's great works too, I mean this is after all a story that involves the legendary sword-saint, Miyamoto Musashi.

Because

is simply one fo the most favourable mangaka of all time.