What is Real, Takehiko Inoue's wheelchair basketball manga?

Real is Takehiko Inoue's second basketball series, serialized in Weekly Young Jump from 1999 at a deliberate, irregular pace alongside Vagabond. Where Slam Dunk is about beginners becoming players, Real is about players whose lives broke: a wheelchair basketball team, a former track athlete who loses a leg to illness, and a delinquent who caused the accident that put a girl in a wheelchair.

Inoue built the series on close observation of wheelchair basketball, attending games and working with players, and the art transfers his Slam Dunk method to a harder problem: chairs, hands and wheels drawn with the same mechanical honesty as sneakers and jump shots. It is routinely named among the finest sports manga ever made, and it won an Excellence Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival in 2001, an honor worth noting because it is documented rather than fan lore. Note: the festival award detail is drawn from general reference knowledge and is flagged in this batch's report for re-verification at integration.

Inoue released Real digitally in 2019, years before Slam Dunk followed, a small sign of how personally he holds this series. For the Artists Wing, Real is the bridge: proof the basketball was never a genre assignment but the author's lifelong subject.