Ganbare!! Tabuchi-kun!!

Ganbare!! Tabuchi-kun!! (Japanese: がんばれ!!タブチくん!!; lit. "Good Luck!! Tabuchi-kun!!"), is a yonkoma manga series by Hisaichi Ishii which ran in the weekly Manga Action magazine from 1978 to 1979 in Japan. After that series ended, Ishii continued creating more baseball gag comics which were then collected under the title Tabuchi-kun (タブチくん) and released from 1985 to 1989. The main character of the gag comic series is based on (and named for) Kōichi Tabuchi, a Japanese professional baseball player. While in most instances, the character in the manga is referred to using katakana characters, the kanji used for the real Tabuchi were used in one instance. A series of three anime films based on the manga were released in 1979 and 1980.