Why isn’t there more original anime? Writing an original story takes much longer than adapting an existing one and involves a larger staff (and thus more people who have to be paid). Adapting an existing story with a large and enthusiastic fanbase basically guarantees marketshare, where a new one means a larger advertising budget and more effort spent recruiting viewers. It also means success isn’t guaranteed, whereas an adaptation of My Hero Academia, Given, Jujitsu Kaisen, or Haikyu!! is basically guaranteed to pay for itself when viewers who haven’t read the manga decide to become readers and everyone is looking for merch.
That doesn’t mean, however, that there haven’t always been creators willing to take risks on original anime. And sometimes, when those anime left us begging for more, we got it in the form of manga.
Here are a few you might enjoy:
Manga is great. Anime is great. Two great tastes that go great together, no matter which one inspires the spinoff property. It’s all a wonderful chaotic feedback loop anyway and long may it reign.
And beyond being sporty and adventure-y it’s just a really pretty show.
The manga it spawned took a little bit of a different direction and I sort of love it for picking up the delightful, goofy elements of the show and chibifying them. Because while the anime is high drama because anime, at its core, Sk8 is very much about rediscovering joy in a world that’s trying its best to take everything you love away from you, about digging in and refusing to let go. About how, even after loss, it’s okay to remember how to love something. That’s a hard message for adults to accept sometimes; giving to to us in a form that’s a little more childlike, in a visual style that matches the kind of wonder we forget we’re still allowed to have? It might just be the push we need.
The manga picks up where the show and movies leave off: our heroes trying to figure one another out before they kill each other, and their joint effort to figure out who killed Bunny’s (AKA Barnaby) parents. But enter a vigilante who has some valid points about hero culture. And the telekinetic baby. Also the super supremacist…and…Let’s just say a hero duo’s work is never done.
Which is probably why we’ve all watched Yuri on Ice!!! and Haikyu!! five times this year.
There’s nothing quite like going home again though, even if home is a spaceship in the cold, dark void you share with your bounty hunting crew. A cold, dark void that can murder you in thousands of different ways if you make even the tiniest of incidental, accidental errors. And there’s something to be said for the odd comfort of the dread we understood, the dread that made sense. And if that is what you’re looking for, behold the glory days of manga covers complete with smoking and underbutt. Which…really…haven’t changed that much.
And before anyone gets bent out of shape, yes, Cowboy Bebop: Shooting Star by Cain Kuga did start serialization before the first episode of the show was broadcast but the show was planned and ready to air and the manga was based on the show’s concept, storyline, and characters. The second manga series, titled simply Cowboy Bebop, which is additional adventures of the Bebop‘s crew that take place during the show’s timeline, wasn’t serialized until November of 1998, well after the show’s original run started in Japan.
