How All Out!! Turned Rugby Manga into Acrylic Collectibles

All Out!! Gion Kenji Manga-Panel Acrylic Keychain

A Sports Manga That Put Rugby Front and Center

All Out!! is a rugby manga by Shiori Amase, serialized in Kodansha’s Morning Two magazine from 2012 to 2020 and collected across 25 volumes. Rugby is an unusual subject for manga — the medium gravitates toward baseball, basketball, and soccer — and All Out!! stands as one of the few works to put scrums, tackles, and lineouts at the heart of its storytelling, along with a cast of characters drawn with deliberately varied body types that reflect the sport’s real-world diversity. The anime adaptation, produced by Madhouse, ran for 25 episodes from October 2016 through March 2017. Licensed merchandise from the series carries the copyright mark “© A/K,” understood to represent the author and Kodansha.

Gion Kenji and the Character Behind the Design

Gion Kenji is one of the manga’s two central protagonists — a first-year student at Kanagawa High School who is small in build but fierce in temperament. The contrast between his compact frame and the physical demands of rugby runs through the series as both dramatic tension and a recurring source of humor. His arc is built around a central question: whether sheer determination can compensate for size in a sport where size tends to dominate.

This item depicts him in a manga-panel format: monochrome line art with halftone dot shading that evokes the texture of a printed comic page. A speech bubble carries a line expressing something like the longing to know what a great rugby play truly feels like — a fitting sentiment for a character whose whole story is about chasing that experience. A grid-pattern element in the background reads as a rugby environment, possibly a goal post, fence, or scrum formation rendered as silhouette behind the figure.

Acrylic Goods and What They Tell You About Japanese Anime Merchandise

The item belongs to a format Japanese collectors call an “akkie” — an acrylic plate cut to the irregular outline of the character and speech bubble, rather than trimmed to a standard rectangle. A separate transparent acrylic base allows it to stand independently on a desk or shelf, so it functions as a small display piece as well as a bag accessory. This dual-use design has been a staple of Japanese anime merchandise since the mid-2010s, when manga-panel-style acrylic goods became a popular way to translate the aesthetic of printed comics into a collectible, three-dimensional format.

Goods of this type were typically sold through specialty anime retailers, event venues, and collaboration cafes, timed to broadcast milestones or new volume releases. The most probable production window for this piece is the anime broadcast period of 2016–2017, though the manga’s run continued through 2020 and a later release is possible. Without manufacturer markings or lot information, the exact date cannot be confirmed. What is clear is that rugby occupies a genuinely narrow space within anime and manga globally, and All Out!! is the genre’s most prominent example — a distinction that drew heightened international attention around the 2019 Rugby World Cup, hosted in Japan.