About

Captain Tsubasa Album Cover Art Parodies, known as " The Incredible Heads-Tall Series" (Japanese: 頭身がすごいシリーズ) in Japan, refers to a series of parody illustrations inspired by the cover art of a music album for Japanese manga Captain Tsubasa^[1] written by Yōichi Takahashi. Since 2010, it's been a popular motif for redrawing on Pixiv.

Origin

On April 25th, 2010, Japanese online music news media Barks published an article about a compilation album of popular soccer-related songs released the next month to celebrate Captain Tsubasa's 30th anniversary.^[2] It also revealed its pre-match team photo-like cover art featuring the manga's main characters, who grew to 20 years old in the latest arc, wearing the national team's Samurai Blue jersey (shown below).

Spread

Many viewers were confused by the ridiculous head-and-body ratio of the characters in the cover art, which looked more than 1:10. 2channel users in /news/ board quickly made fun of it with funny photo collages (shown below, left)^[3], partly because Mr. Takahashi was already a laughing stock among the anonymous board users due to his art. After the 1990s, he sometimes provided such collapsed compositions ignoring art theory (below, center and right). A popular Matome blog, Itai News (痛いニュース), spread that thread beyond the textboard community^[4] and made Japanese internet users liken unnatural body proportions in media titles or people with too-small heads to this manga. Those figures are sometimes referred to as the "Captain Tsubasa Heads Tall" (キャプ翼頭身, Capu Tsuba Toushin).

On Pixiv, this cover art soon became the subject of parody, which often used the title of the Matome Blog's post as a phrasal template, "It's a hot topic that X's heads tall is incredible" (「X」の頭身がすごいと話題に), for its title.^[5] Later, this series of redraws got boosted after user Yuze (ユーゼ) uploaded a template image on August 13th.^[6] Pixiv's curation service, Pixivision, picked up this illustration trend in 2015^[7] and 2018.^[8]

Throughout those online reactions, the visibility of the manga's weirdness grew enough to get parodied in the Japanese manga Gin Tama^[9] in its 420th chapter, published in late 2012 (shown below, left), which also appeared in the 329th episode of its TV anime series aired on October 2nd, 2017 (below, right).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References