The Exception to the Rule’s Exceptional Endgame

By Jonathan L. Switzer

Neon Genesis Evangelion Vol. 11
Story & Art by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto
Original Concept by GAINAX – khara
Published by Viz Media, LLC, $9.99
www.viz.com

It was five years ago — it seems like forever and yesterday at the same time — that I was in much the same position that I am now, writing a review of a volume of manga adapting episodes of an anime series. Five years ago it was the first volume of the fresh-off-the-presses manga adaptation of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, a terrible robot anime adapted haphazardly by an artist with sub-doujinshi drawing chops. I remember being too kind to that volume of manga; do a quick Google search and you can see for yourself. I think I was just glad that the artist had drifted off-model with the character designs, giving a harder edge to Hisashi Hirai’s puffy fish-faced teens, and was a little impressed that he had done a tidy job streamlining the story to cram a great deal of material into that first book. I still wonder why Del Rey picked that particular series to lead off their manga imprint; I suspect they thought there was gold in those hills. Given that they turned around and licensed a fistful more Gundam SEED material afterward, maybe there was, but for me, reading that volume stuck another nail into my assumption that most anime adaptation manga are pretty sad, sorry cash-grab affairs.

It was a little over ten years ago — the moment, crystal-clear in my mind; the surrounding events, hazy as though enveloped in a thick soupy fog — that I was sitting alone at a high school lunch table in Southeast Kansas with several issues of the Neon Genesis Evangelion comic book series tucked away in my backpack. I remember rereading the first several, full-color pages of that first issue, taking in that moment of Shinji Ikari sitting in a plane, lazily regarding from the skies the city that, unbeknownst to him, he will soon find himself defending. By then I’m fairly sure I’d watched the end of the TV series, or at least had read of its controversial, off-puttingly anti-climactic ending, and found the prospect of an altogether different take refreshing — especially one handled by the TV series’s phenomenal character designer, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. Those first few issues were pretty swift-going, scooping up our teenage hero and throwing him into his first confrontation with Tokyo-3’s mysterious invaders with all good speed. There was an energy there that was missing from the first episode of the TV series; the comic series hit the ground running, where the TV show unfolded a lot more deliberately and mysteriously, emphasizing atmosphere over action.

Yet, despite all that running, here we are, a decade later, and I’m reviewing the eleventh book of Sadamoto’s manga. And it’s not over yet.You see, the difference between Sadamoto’s Evangelion manga and that Gundam SEED manga I reviewed five years back — and between Evangelion and so many adaptation manga that you see in the marketplace, like Code Geass, Wolf’s Rain, RahXephon, or Cowboy Bebop — is that not only are we dealing with an adaptation by one of the key people responsible for the original TV series, the original character designer and co-creator of the series, but — well, for crying out loud, it’s Evangelion. For any of you who were too young, or living under a rock during the 1990’s, Gainax’s Neon Genesis Evangelion was one of the most phenomenally popular anime shows of that decade, and it continues to be a cash cow for the studio fourteen years later. It turned a cash-strapped, spend-thrift studio of professional fanboys into an anime studio to be reckoned with, and in the United States it became the cornerstone of ADV Films’s anime distribution empire — an empire, mind you, that’s spent the last few years crumbling away, but regardless, the root cause of the good years they had was the fortune they made selling, and reselling, and repackaging Neon Genesis Evangelion on videocassette and DVD.

Viz has made a few bucks packaging and repackaging some of this material as well. As I remarked earlier, the first several books of this series saw print as thirty-some-page floppy comic books. I still have a full run of those tucked away somewhere in a musty old longbox; the author of the English adaptation these past twelve years or so, Carl Gustav Horn, wrote some tremendous essays in the back pages of those comics, and would routinely respond to reader mail with the latest news on the franchise and his own interpretations of the material. Those comics would later be repackaged as trade paperback collections in Viz’s then-standard 5 1/2″ x 8″ graphic novel size — and then, of course, a handful of years ago they were repackaged again in the now-standard digest manga size that TokyoPop popularized.

“Well, that’s all great, Jonathan,” you might say at this point, “but what’s it about, and is it any good?” I assume you’d say that because while I’ve so far suggested this might be worthwhile, I haven’t really said it outright, have I?

Oh yes, this is very good stuff. Better than the TV show, I daresay.

Evangelion takes place in the near future, nearly a decade and a half after a catastrophe known as the Second Impact wiped out a significant percentage of the Earth’s population. Mankind finds itself under attack from a race of giant beings called Angels, and its only line of defense is a series of bio-engineered weapons called Evangelions — weapons that look remarkably like giant robots, and are piloted by children born in the immediate aftermath of the Second Impact. Our hero, Shinji Ikari, is the teenage son of the man heading up the organization that mobilizes the Evangelions — Gendo Ikari, supreme commander of NERV.

The neat thing about Evangelion is that, at least to its original Japanese audience, these are essentially all tropes that had been played a thousand times throughout the 1970’s, and had been rehashed and reheated again throughout the early 1990’s. Evangelion took these silly and comfortable rails of the robot animation genre and put at this story’s core a damaged, frightened, disconnected young man, and wrapped around him a complex web of conspiracy propped up with Judeo-Christian symbolism and terminology. Adam, Lilith, the Spear of Longinus, Angels, even the very title: Neon (or New) Genesis Evangelion. The language of it invites all sorts of discussion over what the series really means by this or that, and what was going on in the mind of the TV series’s famously troubled director, Hideaki Anno.

These are things that really didn’t interest me in Evangelion the first time through. Sure, I was interested in where the plot was headed, in what the Angels want from mankind and whether Shinji was ever going to man up and stop whining so much, but all this heady stuff that asked you to go digging through religious symbolism and psychology textbooks? No thanks. I just wanted to see the big purple robot-looking thing lay some smackdowns on the squiggly alien-looking guys and find out what was really going on with the shadowy conspiracy guys who met in the creepy virtual conference room. Much to my frustration, the mecha action stuff always got the short shrift; Evangelion pretends to be a giant robot show, but it’s much more a character study crossed with a sci-fi conspiracy thriller with a religious bent.

Funny thing is, even ten years on I still don’t care all that much about the deep readings of the work. I’ve said before that Evangelion is only as deep as the viewer’s perception of it; if you see the layers, they’re there. If not, they’re not. Me, I never have seen them; to me, the religious stuff always seemed to be window dressing designed solely to add some controversial undertones to the show’s mythology, and Shinji’s problems could have been resolved in a much less mind-boggling way. It’s never been one of my favorite anime shows, probably to some extent because of that feeling of it pulling a bait-and-switch, and while it was one of the first I watched from start to finish, looking back I don’t think it’s the one that made me an anime viewer for life.

Despite that, I snatched up those new editions of the Evangelion manga as they came out, and continue to read the manga as new volumes arrive on a roughly annual basis. There are three reasons I do this, and all three are on display in this latest volume.

First and foremost is Sadamoto’s raw, dazzling skill as an artist and storyteller. This volume adapts the twenty-fourth episode of the Evangelion TV series, and anyone who’s seen that episode knows about the climactic decision that young Shinji Ikari has to make at the end, and how the moment of that decision is drawn out for something like two minutes as the animation stops and the music swells. Sadamoto manages to pull off this moment with a lot more panache and grace in the manga, recreating the tension of the moment with so many more pictures in the absence of sound, at the same time paying off a character-building moment he created in the previous volume.

Second is the unpredictability of the manga. Throughout these eleven books, character relationships have been rearranged, introductions have been pushed up, battles have been waged off-camera to devote more time to story and character, and all-new scenes have been added to further flesh out the series cast in new and entertaining ways. Fiesty red-headed EVA-02 pilot Asuka’s introduction in the TV series, where she boldly introduces herself to the assembled cast members on the deck an aircraft carrier, may be a classic Evangelion moment, but I far prefer the sight of Shinji and his classmates warily approaching her as she angrily tries her hand at one of those lousy crane games, trying for a prize she can’t quite nab. The brawl that follows is wilder than any sequence of the TV series, and moreso solidifies Asuka as a force to be reckoned with even beyond her skill handling an Evangelion.

Finally, I simply prefer Sadamoto’s handling of these characters, most of all his take on Shinji Ikari. Anno’s Shinji always strikes me as morose and whiny, a worthless unchanging lump who’s hard to like and spends so much time feeling sorry for himself that it’s no wonder his commander and caretaker Misato feels the urge to knock some sense into him every once in a while. “You’re a boy, so act like one!” a drunken Misato would shout at the worthless sack of potatoes in human form that is Anno’s version of Evangelion’s protagonist. Sadamoto’s Shinji is a lot more sarcastic and a lot more prone to fits of anger than to hangdog depression. Certainly the dark road of Evangelion’s twisting tale leads towards an overwhelming sadness and darkness that would be very difficult to recover from after a while, but Sadamoto’s Shinji doesn’t stew in it nearly as long as Anno’s does. Sadamoto’s version of Shinji reaches that point after fighting against the tide for a long, long time, lashing out, and then steadily growing more and more numb to the point that by volume eleven’s conclusion he’s finally, at long last, reached the same low Anno brought him to. I empathize more with the road of misery Sadamoto laid out; I find it easier to connect with. Certainly it’s a personal preference, but I find a bitter protagonist far more relatable than a sad sack protagonist who gets slapped around a lot, especially in the context of a story like Evangelion.

So, to sum up: Yoshiyuki Sadamoto’s manga adaptation of Neon Genesis Evangelion is a worthwhile retelling of its anime counterpart, brilliantly rendered and interestingly different from the twenty-six television episodes it’s based on. While I’m not the biggest fan of the groundbreaking mecha anime, I find myself eagerly awaiting each new volume of Sadamoto’s take on the material, curious what new twists and turns he’ll employ to keep me guessing, and always surprised anew that he’s made me interested in a lead character I thought I had enough of back during the Clinton administration. As the story spirals towards its inevitible conclusion, one or two years off depending on how much ground Sadamoto chooses to cover in the next volume, it continues to shock and impress with dramatic departures from the original storyline that still feel right in the context of what comes before and after and artwork so sure-footed it could only come from the pen that originally breathed life into these characters. This continues to be one of my favorite manga series still ongoing, and is highly recommended for fans of well-crafted apocalyptic sci-fi-tinged conspiracy, and for those of you out there who thought you were done with Shinji, Rei, Misato, and Asuka after the head-scratching finale of the original animation. Trust me, there’s something different and wonderful going on here, and I can’t get enough of it.

-JLS