Buzzer Beater is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Takehiko Inoue. The series debuted as a webcomic, and it was made available in Japanese, English, Chinese, and Korean. Buzzer Beater was being serialized in Monthly Shōnen Jump shortly after its introduction on the web. An anime adaptation of the webcomic was released in 2005, a second season coming out two years later.
Inoue launched Buzzer Beater as an online comic in May 1996 on the Sports-i ESPN website. It was his second manga to focus on basketball, following his very successful second manga series, Slam Dunk. The name of the manga comes from the term used for when a basket is scored at the same moment a period or the game itself ends. The story revolves around a basketball team from Earth assembled to participate in an intergalactic basketball competition. The webcomic is released online in four languages. The original Japanese webcomic is available on Inoue's personal website. Inoue manually wrote all text in the webcomic, though these were altered in the translated adaptions. The English translation leaves all the Japanese sound effects untranslated, keeping the manga entirely unedited. The manga's Korean translation has a completely different designed page, however, replacing the Japanese sound effects with a Korean translation drawn by Inoue. The same translation was serialized in Daiwon C.I.'s manhwamagazineComic Champ, and also published under its Champ Comics line. The Chinese edition is directly translated from the Korean one. Buzzer Beater was published in print format by Shueisha shortly after it began, as it was being serialized in its Monthly Shōnen Jumpmanga magazine from February 1997 to August 1998. The manga has also been compiled in four print volumes.
Anime
Buzzer Beater is Inoue's second manga series to have been adopted into an anime. A 13 episode TV series was produced by TMS Entertainment and premiered on WOWOW from February 5, 2005, ending its run onMay 7, 2005. A second 13 episode series, continuing the story and also animated by TMS, premiered on Nippon Television on July 4, 2007 and ended its run on September 26, 2007. Both anime adaptations were supervised by Inoue. The anime series includes story elements and characters that were either hinted at or did not originally appear in the manga.
