A lot of sports manga have been written. We’ve had Ninja volleyball and superpowered soccer. We have seen tennis players who’ve looked like they could bend the laws of physics. We’ve also seen basketball players who can dunk from the three-point line. But we have never seen a fully realized, competitive sport that fuses basketball and tennis together, not just in a compelling manner, but also in a way that feels like you could walk to the nearest abandoned tennis court and play it yourself. It’s been like that until now, thanks to Dean Ware’s Victory Syllabus: A Graphic Novel.
A group of 3-4 freshmen lost a pick-up game to the JV basketball team. Out of frustration with the traditional basketball, one of them asked, “what if we made our own game?” They went to a place called Larklaw’s place and invented it. One of the illustrations presents basketball as a sport and a system that was built on ego, reputation, and crushing of the weak. That’s exactly what the freshmen intended to remove.
Their invention was a game called Travelling. It wasn’t just a physical game but an intellectual one too. You could only get better by carefully studying the map. The map treats rules with the same reverence as fantasy books treat magic. It comprises a set of details that turn the sport into a puzzle, a puzzle similar to a fast-paced game of chess, where the board is a tennis court, and the pieces your own movements. Every step is calculated. Every dribble is well-thought out.
Ware has dedicated enough space to the actual rules of Travelling. Most comics would simply show the protagonist studying them. Ware refuses that. He instead pulls us into the game’s mechanics to understand them, and to keep up with the players. By doing that, he turns us from passive spectators into active participants, who, just like the players, feel the weight of every Forward Reset, the risk of every Folly, and the ticking of the 22-second rally clock.
This character-driven story is propelled by art that doesn’t just show us what’s happening but also, how the characters feel about the happenings. Their faces are incredibly expressive, which is really important to the reader for such a sport that’s deeply psychological. They enable the reader to see the mind behind the action and the movements.
Ware uses a saturated and bold color palette that pops off the page, making everything feel alive and energetic. He also strategically uses color change to signal shifts in tone, the way a filmmaker uses light. He uses red during tense moments, blue during cleaner, more strategic moments, and purple during moments of shock or revelation. That color variation makes the reader feel the game and experience it from the inside.
Quill says: Dean Ware’s Victory Syllabus: A Graphic Novel is for the young reader who appreciates a protagonist who wins with his brain as much as his body. But more than anything, it’s for the reader who doesn’t mind being trusted by the author to memorize the mechanics and understand its characters on a psychological level. It’s a great graphic novel, and one whose art serves the story.
