Anime-to-manga adaptations worth reading

This is the fourth blog post of a series on the occasion of ‘100 Years of Anime’. Read the other posts here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Today we come full circle and return to comics. While most anime are adapted from manga, many original anime have been adapted into manga. Although I haven’t read that many manga based on anime, I’d like to recommend some that I found particularly interesting. As always in my comic reviews, “volumes reviewed” indicates volumes I’ve recently re-read specifically for this blog post and which the review text refers to, i.e. not counting those I’ve read only once.

Neon Genesis Evangelion (新世紀エヴァンゲリオン / Shinseiki Evangelion)
Language: German (translated from Japanese)
Authors: Yoshiyuki Sadamoto / Studio Gainax
Publisher: Carlsen (originally Kadokawa Shoten)
Years: 1999-2015 (originally 1994-2013)
Number of volumes: 14
Volumes reviewed: 1
Pages per volume: ~165
Price per volume: € 6,00
Website: https://www.carlsen.de/serie/neon-genesis-evangelion/18147 (German)
ISBN: 978-3-551-74131-X

I’ve never quite got my head around why Evangelion has become such a cult anime series. Its popularity might be due to having done a lot of things right at the right time. (For more on this aspect, see Sean O’Mara’s blog post on the early years of Studio Gainax.) Looking at the manga (drawn by Gainax character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto), there are two actual assets that Evangelion has going for it:

1. Shinji the emo kid: in the distant future of the year 2015, this troubled teenage protagonist has some issues that quite a few readers of today can probably relate to. On the very first page, Shinji thinks, “I don’t have any dreams, hopes or anything like that. […] That’s why I thought, I didn’t care if I had an accident or died.”
   But then he gets to pilot a mecha…
2. Mecha design: at its core, Evangelion is still a story about giant robots, and as such, it has to feature mechas that look cool. And they do. The biomorphic or humanoid shape of the EVAs sets them apart from more angular designs in e.g. Mobile Suit Gundam or Transformers.

That being said, there are also many silly ideas in this manga, both in story and design, and a plot that verges on a tedious ‘monster of the week’ pattern. Things get more interesting from around vol. 5 on, when a conspiracy within NERV (the organisation operating the EVAs) is gradually revealed.

Ame & Yuki / Wolf Children (おおかみこどもの雨と雪 / Ōkami kodomo no Ame to Yuki)
Language: German (translated from Japanese)
Authors: Mamoru Hosoda / Yū / Yoshiyuki Sadamoto
Publisher: Tokyopop (originally Kōdansha)
Years: 2013-2014 (originally 2000)
Number of volumes: 3
Volumes reviewed: 1
Pages per volume: 155 (vol. 1-2) / 210 (vol. 3)
Price per volume: € 6,95 (box set: € 16,95)
Website: http://tokyopop.de/programm-winter-2013-2014/ame-und-yuki-die-wolfskinder/ (German)
ISBN: 978-3-8420-0905-9

For some years, thanks to a string of successful all-ages theatrical anime films (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Summer Wars), it looked as if director Mamoru Hosoda was going to be ‘the next Miyazaki’, although recently his popularity seems to have been eclipsed by Makoto Shinkai’s. The 117 minutes of Hosoda’s 2012 film Wolf Children (original script by Hosoda himself, character design by the aforementioned Yoshiyuki Sadamoto) have been adapted into a >500 page manga drawn by a newcomer artist who calls herself Yū (優).

In the beginning, the narration seems very fast-paced, as we witness in quick succession how university student Hana falls in love with a fellow student who turns out to be a werewolf, the birth of their two children, and the death of the werewolf guy. But this isn’t the story of Hana, it’s the story of her two children who grow up with the secret of being werewolves too, and who ultimately (in later volumes) have to decide whether they want to spend their lives as humans or as wolves. The supernatural element of the werewolf transformations are neither satisfactorily explained nor excitingly depicted, but as an emotional drama manga, Ame & Yuki works really well.

FLCL (フリクリ / Furi Kuri)
Language: German (translated from Japanese)
Authors: Studio Gainax / Hajime Ueda
Publisher: Carlsen (originally Kadokawa Shoten)
Year: 2003 (originally 2002)
Number of volumes: 3 2
Volumes reviewed: 1
Pages per volume: 192
Price per volume: € 6,00
Website: https://www.mangaupdates.com/series.html?id=1532 (Baka-Updates)
ISBN: 978-3-551-75951-1

The OVA series FLCL (Gainax / Production I.G 2000-2001) has a reputation of being one of the weirdest anime ever, and the manga adaptation lives up to that. It’s hard even to give a plot summary, because sometimes you just don’t get what’s going on, and it’s difficult to tell events that are important to the plot apart from those that are not (grandpa’s gateball match?!), and there’s a fair amount of non-linear storytelling and perhaps even unreliable narration involved. What we all can agree on, though, is that the story starts with teenager Naota getting hit in the head with a guitar by a woman on a scooter. To his surprise, he later finds this woman has moved in with his family as a housekeeper. Things become weirder and weirder for Naota as he is confronted with giant-robot attacks, an arson series, and romantic advances from two girls from his school.

All this is depicted in an art style that is really a multitude of art styles between which Ueda continually switches, often leaning to a seemingly crude look with broad, uneven outlines. A lot of the humour in FLCL operates on the verbal level – which works surprisingly well in translation -, for instance when the woman riding a Vespa scooter gets nicknamed “the wasp woman”.

Honourable mention: Some years ago I read the one-volume adaptation of Makoto Shinkai’s Hoshi no koe / Voices of a Distant Star (art by Mizu Sahara) and liked it, but I don’t have a copy at hand to read it again.