While I have never been on the level of the “obsessive Otaku Japanabe” Anime/Manga fan, I do have several things from the style, genre, whatever i enjoy a lot. One of those is Evangelion. I should probably preface that by saying I mean “The core Old School Evangelion”. Not nessesarily all of this new school cash in bull shit where the characters are all cutified knockoffs of themselves or over sexed hentai dolls pimped out by the series creators.
I’m taking Neon Genesis Evangelion, where giant Evas kick the shit out of giant “Angels” in a battle royal for control of the fate of humanity.
I used to own the series on VHS, though I dumped all of those in favor of… dubbing the VHS tapes onto DVDs. I haven’t bought DVDs though I hope to one day after I take out a third mortgage on my house. One irritation with Evangelion is that everything revolving around it tends to be marked up to ridiculous levels. DVD sets for this series aren’t generally cheap. Actually these days that’s less true. Somewhere Gainax reached a saturation point and a set of the series is pretty reasonable. I guess there’s also the extra stigma I have from already having paid out for 13 VHS tapes at 25-30 dollars each.
But enough bitching about the cost of Anime. Let’s get on to a discussion about an out of print Graphic Novel that either no one cares about, or if they do care they’ve already read/own it. Somewhere I managed to pick up around 5 issues of this series of graphic novels. More recently I’ve expanded this collection to include book 6 (and 7). I’m going to single out Book 6 here mostly because it is the entire telling of probably my most favorite sequence of events from the Anime series, the 13th (9th in the Manga here) Angel, Bardiel. It also features a pretty awesome and foretelling cover.
As much as I enjoy the Evangelion anime, it’s full of pointless filler sequences and other crap. Fortunately, Gainax is working on “fixing” this with it’s Evangelion 2.0 project. Thankfully, they already managed to do this in the Manga. As previously mentioned, this Angel is the 9th in the Manga, this means many of the series’ more lame villains along with it’s numerous scenes of “City scenes with Cicada sounds” all get the boot. We’re left with a much better based overall telling of this story. We also get slightly more insight into the thoughts of the characters since thought is something comics handle much more effectively than animation. The Manga series is also a bit “grittier” than the anime, for example, a character who was injured in the Anime may have been killed instead. You know, MAYBE, not to push spoilers or anything (though hey, like I said, chances are anyone reading this doesn’t care or already knows).
Anyway, back on track a bit, the more important point here is that reading this has made me remember how much I enjoyed this series. Especially when it’s stripped of the garbage. It’s a pretty good and twisted tale. The art and presentation at work here is great as well. Simple when needed, complex when needed.
Anyway, I’m not necessarily going to recommend this book or anything, hell starting in the middle of the series would be fruitless anyway. Not to mention that it’s quite aged and harder to find. I will say that Evangelion is a pretty good series and worth looking into if you’ve not already seen/read/heard of it.
