>>2693
Honestly, not really? It's like asking if Digimon ripped off Pokémon because they're similar in a few ways.

>1. Vaguely similar art style and aesthetics
Huh? They look nothing alike. Sure they're about boxing and have two little dudes in boxing shorts for most of the show but it's not like the artstyle is exactly the same. Joe is from 1968 and Ippo is 1989 there's 20 years of difference in the art there.

Joe is mainly about Joe with some snippets of Rikishi, Carlos, Yoko and Danpei and the many random boxers along the way.

Ippo is about a dozen boxers and side characters too (his mother, his friends, his potential relationships) with tons of arcs along the way. There's. Ippo himself, Takamura trying to win all six belts, Mashiba trying to achieve a better life for him and Kumi, Miyata trying to keep to the promise he gave Ippo and more. It's not *just* about Ippo. The latest chapter is about Mashiba right now.

>2. Young man from a disadvantaged background making his way up in the fight game (literally every boxing story at this point)
Joe and Ippo are different characters entirely. Joe is an orphan who pretty much ran away from the orphanage to be a vagrant and just happened to be noticed by Danpei and became a boxer through that (and only because of Rikishi being a perfect rival to him). Ippo was a meek kid who was somewhat bullied in school who then grew to love boxing after Takamura saved him from that bullying. He had a loving mother, a decent job and overall a good life. Joe comes from nothing but Ippo has something.

>3. Tragic end where the protagonist ends up punch drunk and is totally fucked over.
We don't know how Ippo ends and currently Ippo isn't punch drunk He's retired due to...well, I actually don't know. Takamura refers to him as being "broken" but he's not punch drunk like Joe seemed to be by the end as when Ippo was asked to draw a straight line (which iirc is some kind of test to prove if their motor functions are shot) he passed it. I just think something is going to happen to Ippo to get him back into the ring but no one really knows what. George is probably going to have something occur that will make him go back to boxing again but what that is we don't know.

Overall though, I can agree Ippo has taken things from Joe, much like how the Souls series has taken tons from Berserk but I wouldn't call that a rip off either.

All boxing stories follow a simmilar plot structure more or less. Its genre convention. Hajime no Ippo gets repetitive after a while but I've never felt that way about Ashita no Joe.

>George is probably going to have something occur that will make him go back to boxing again but what that is we don't know.
Wait... they are still publishing this series! Hang up the gloves already George!

>>2762
Yeah, well Joe didn't go on for 30 years....

>>2771
Yeah but Hajime no Ippo gets boring fast. Talking - fight scene - talking. Is pretty much the structure of that show. It feels like groundhog day except it never ends.

Considering Joe is THE boxing manga yea I would say he ripped it off or at least capitalized off its popularity. The other guy mentioned the different artstyles, but they don't mention the similarities. The muscle tone is clearly taken from Joe. It's like taking the Mcdonalds arch, turning it upside down, changing the color, and making a new burger chain. The details don't really matter, especially since Ippo is the crappier narrative, when it's obviously a ripoff, by that if it weren't for Joe it wouldn't exist.

I remember when George Murikawa drew a cover for Ring magazine and all the boxing degenerates were complaining about wapaneses.

All boxing fiction fixates on the underdog because it reflects the reality of the "sport" (really just legalized assault) and its what makes boxing appealing. You don't become a human punching bag if you don't have to. When was the last upper class rich kid from the suburbs to become a legit boxing champion? They are all poor kids, refugees, homeless people, ethnic minorities, proles from working families, and kids who were bullied at school. Now a lot of boxing fiction has this "pull yourself up by the bootstraps and be the self made man" theme which is bourgeois capitalist propaganda, as if individual effort can overcome hard societal obstacles.

Ashita no Joe subverts this theme because its heavily implied Joe dies in the end, slumping over in his corner so you can work your ass off, but you can never quite escape or it just kills you. So did boxing save Joe or did it kill him? If he's really dead, aren't we in someway complicit for cheering on a bloodsport where young men are beaten and severely injured? By comparison, Hajime no Ippo feels like a more sanitized depiction of the fight game with all the moral ambiguity stripped away.

Ippo references or cribs from Joe quite a lot, other than the stuff already mentioned. Like Takamura eating a tomato a day to diet like Rikiishi, one of the characters being essentially Joe with a kansai accent, the world champion being a pretty blatant expy of the world champ from Joe.

But if we're really to compare them generally then Joe just has much more substance. At the end of the day Ippo is for the most part a feel-good sports manga that tends to settle into a status quo and repeatedly reset to it for hundreds of chapters at a time, and most of it consists of throwing a kid with no personality in a boxing ring to win over and over again. Ashita no Joe is a study of a very complex character whose circumstances and psychology are constantly changing and evolving, gets into things like philosophy of life, and for as much as Joe finds meaning through picking up boxing it's much more upfront about him having to grapple with the destruction and even death that boxing can bring into people's lives. It's also a social commentary born from the social inequality that was lying underneath the perceived prosperity of Japan in the 1960s, where boxing doubles as a mirror against this (Joe feeling like he can get somewhere by embracing the rules of boxing whereas society remains unfair to Joe even if he conforms better to its rules and customs). Ippo is decidedly not this thoughtful.
Joe by the end has transformed from a brash juvenile delinquent to a quieter, more empathetic and more thoughtful man harboring a lot of guilt and alienation. Ippo's biggest problems are being upset about not winning a fight, and later quitting boxing and being worried about punch-drunk syndrome, both of which are things Joe did too, but with more nuanced context and a less one-note character, and without spending hundreds of chapters at a time teasing and blueballing the audience on the story going anywhere and endlessly repeating the same handful of scenes that never lead anywhere.

If we're looking at the art, just because Ippo's art has more detailed rendering doesn't inherently make it better. Chiba Tetsuya's art is clean, efficient, panels are well-blocked and composed, very readable. Ippo's action is notorious for how unreadable it becomes as the manga goes on; it's hard to believe but it was more than a decade ago that people started meming on the french fries flying around the ring all the time.
And if we're talking about the anime adaptations, both of the Ashita no Joe anime are stellar, the first being a major leap forward for TV anime as well, with a lot of passion for art and for the medium put into them. The Ippo anime's alright but compared to Dezaki in his prime it's not really a competition.