Full Details
SF Manga 101: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Glenn Hough (gallyangel) is a nonpracticing futurist, an anime and manga otaku, and is almost obsessive about finishing several of the lists tracked on WWEnd. In this series on SF Manga Glenn will provide an overview of the medium and the place of science fiction within it.
Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here!
Neon Genesis Evangelion, or NGE, has been known to do things to people; it changes them. You have been warned.
When otaku start talking about the NGE anime, it’s normal to talk in clichés and you start to use words or phrases like ground breaking, shattering, stunning, mind-numbing complexity, totally awesome, Rei is so Moe, Or Baka! Shinji (You fool, Shinji!).
When the anime hit in 95 and 96 to say that it changed the face of anime and that it reforged the big giant mecha genre, is not an understatement or hyperbole. That’s what happened. But NGE didn’t just stop. The anime had several movies, which tied up the ending of the series, before moving on to a rebuild series of movies that clarified and distilled the major themes, concentrating and enhancing what was already there.
Now the manga is what we would call a novelization. And they’re still being produced, even after almost a lapse of 20 years. One of the leads from the anime is doing this. Yoshiyuki Sadamoto is sort of slow and there have been pauses in the production. That’s just the way it worked out. But this slowness has allowed the manga to follow it’s own process of distillation and clarification, making for a more concise rendering of the basic story line. I feel the manga stands by itself and is good enough for a top five placement in the SF manga pantheon.
