basket
Writer: Pakomokkand
Illustrator: Marie Darranvia
Letter: Steph Bulante
Editors: Sara Hagstrom and Steph Bulante
Publisher: Lucky Pocket Press / $25
Spring 2025
Basket is exactly what you want. Team, Scrappy. Slim chances of winning big games. Girl, crush it. There’s a duel mystery driving the first half, who is the non-practical coach meeting, and exactly what’s with Ine? Management plots and Dark Horse Star players clash, and the second half of the Pakomokkand storyline works like a genre classic. Training, teamwork, game day and what will come after. Will Innes and Fanny’s friendship save the team or will it sink? However, the presentation is not what you expect. The clean lines of the basketball court are marked up, hatched, worked, sketched and textured with the Doodlepad Pencil Marie Derambure, which is used throughout the book by Marie Derambure, a Doodlepad pencil, for the entire book.
nice. Printed in all pencils, no ink, tons of texture, “deep plum”. Lucky Pocket Press is one of the publishers who think about the colours on which the book is located, the texture of the pages printed, and the texture of the book being in the reader’s hands. Made to order, and worked violently, but the fines and the glamorous opposition. Sketchy, it’s perfect for action. The basket is extremely sensual in its charm, with the details of the defensive player blurred, and readers experience the speed of a girl flying into the hoop, with the pill lit.
Derambure’s is a wild style that switches from panel to panel, not just inside panels. Just as much as the fantastic action ball comics like Sam Bosma’s fantasy sports, it’s like a neighborhood story by Yazawa. Not bound by any rules – save the mood the cartoonist was aiming for at the moment – but it’s visually perfectly put together. With details on the stick figure, it’s all recognizable basket.
However, it’s like a simple plot. A solid story, front half mystery and back half influence the big game at the end of the season. Certainly there is an unpredictable turnaround, but it makes clear where it is heading and takes you there. But there is a refined restraint in Moccand’s story. The basket gives you a moment, real sweat will get there, and different players will train at the same time as conflicting ambitions, practice, patience and luck. But Moccand excludes moments where every girl realizes how much she has achieved and grown up, and makes her realize the sports stories that other cliches follow the same game plan.
This approach is spoken in Neorealismo’s language. It looks like an unadorned slice. The time spent during the game training on the asphalt court talks about life as Ines and Fanny practice their insanity. This unorthodox indie approach is exacerbated by the heavy sensual focus of visual storytelling. What makes baskets so comic-specific is that they always integrate montages into narrative sequences. You see and feel the small side of each character’s moment of passing through the cutaway panel, inserting shots filled with emotional resonance rather than without narrative explanation. Something like a dream, surreal thing. It all fits seamlessly, pulling readers inside and putting sneakers on the floorboards.
Derambure bends the rules by having the characters cross the groove. 25% of dynamic illustration/design choices are 75%, playing on the court bigger than life, emotionally destroying reality. Something scribbled everywhere has the persuasive (often comedic) use of negative spaces. The basket is filled with multiple exposure moments where widescreen panels become murals. The rush and fake out sequences that lead players to the rim are all displayed in the same uninterrupted space, forming a Ducasian line throughout the page. It talks about the manga and gives readers experience playing rather than following the narration of the announcer. That’s what we’re here in the comics, right? Looking at that, that’s it. Basket duty.
Basket can be said to contain information in the manga. Part of the difficulties in identifying generational shifts from spinner racks is the Genesis of what comics look like. But stylistically and to some degree structurally, the basket is different from the cartoon outside the Glacier Bay. It actually reminds me of my last chance to find Duke, a comic by Shan Chan (a Chinese living in France) from PEOW2 (a Sweden/New Jersey-based studio). A national cartoon without a map. The basket is advertised as “Shojo Slam Dunk.” Shojo is a magazine whose typical content is synonymous with editorial categories, and baskets have a connection between writing and art. but. Unless you come from a Japanese Shojo magazine, it’s a story about a shining girl.
What’s going on under the story is a little more Josey than Shojo. While girls are primarily guarding their reasons, savvy readers can pick up social subtexts that influence their choices and mine deeper character experiences that reflect the real world. The INES is short, and in most cases it’s just as short as it prevents you from playing Pro. I’m not going to stop that from giving her everything. If you can’t win, is the game worth playing? A sense of happiness during play makes all your practice worthwhile after the game is over. You could lose and still have a good game.
Well, maybe you can. It is not an option for INES. Philosophically, taking an L with grace is admirable. But it does not recognize the limited opportunities for girls like her. Odds pile up against Ine due to her gender, her financial background, her height and uncompromising attitude – her career cannot be ignored. It’s up to you to decide what she’s going to do to move on, and she’s not going to make any excuses. She’s here to play.
And like I said, this book isn’t about that. It’s about a local club, too small for an air-conditioned auditorium, playing the last game against Powerhouse Regional favorites. Social subtext is just that. Or it’s about both, all the works, etc. Moccand’s story is stable in its progression, while Derambure’s story is constant in its experiment and is the same story. Many genres, many styles, seeing, swirling experiences of emotions and existence.
Comics outweigh the language used to describe them. The influence of cartoons on modern comics (as aesthetic and storytelling influence) is detached from the aspects of the manga’s cultural origins that inform its aesthetics and storytelling choices, capturing the energy of the medium, but lacking root nuances. A gap that the basket creator fills himself. Metamodernism is a combination of classic modernist works, serious attempts to tell traditional stories, and postmodernist approaches are told in a dreamy artistic style, and traditions are told in terms of stories that never dreamed of. The basket is past metamodern, but changes are made to the form, but not in conversation with the media or modernism.
That said, conversations with the medium are definitely the kind of thing to listen to, and if you can find it, it will move your art form quite forward. Dermabure and Moccand gave their readers a gift. This is the absolute unparalleled thrill of discovering new things, the opportunity to see things you’ve never seen before. Unusual, basketball. All of this is indifferent, passionate and lawless, and it dreams and surrealizes obvious fiction. She shoots and scores.
Baskets are available from Lucky Pocket Press or where finer comics, comics, or books are available for sale.
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