Favorite Manga

[gunswordfist]

Thanks! I definitely feel honored and lucky to have been able to meet him.  Doubly so that he actually answered one of my questions, since Viz only took four between the Viz and Funimation twitter and facebook. 

OMG, that is even more incredible!

[Spark Of Spirit]

I'm very close to collecting all the Flame of Recca volumes. I have to admit it has taken a lot more time than I thought it would. I still have around ten volumes left, but it's been a trip.

Looking it over, they could re-adapt this into an anime easily. However, it would have to be longer than the Ushio & Tora anime due to the whole thing basically being a long narrative string. They would simply have to up the pace. There are four main story arcs, and they are all pretty indispensable. Give or take a few episodes, you could get it all done in 78 episodes or slightly less.

Episode 1-13: Beginnings and Kurei Mansion Arc (Volume 1-4.5)
Episode 14-39 (four chapters an episode): Ura Butou Satsujin Arc (Volume 4.5-16)
Episode 40-52: Sealed Lands Arc (Volume 17-22)
Episode 53-78 (four chapters an episode): SODOM Arc (Volume 23-33)

Unfortunately, this drastically lowers its chances at getting a proper new anime adaption. Investing in a new anime at this point probably wouldn't happen due to the amount of episodes it would have to have, which is a shame. As great a tourney as the Ura Botou Satsujin is, it does not make for a good ending to the story or the characters, and because of the stupid way the old anime ended, there is no chance they can simply start from the Sealed Lands arc and go to the end. It would need around twice the episode count of Ushio & Tora to tell the complete story.

Man, it's such a shame that Pierrot botched the old anime. It really deserved better than the sub-par show it got.

[LumRanmaYasha]

Thinking about how a studio could re-adapt a manga series as new anime is actually an embarrassing pastime of mine. 

It'd be cool if they could re-do FOR, but yeah, six cours might be too much of an investment for a studio to make, even if the series was still pretty relevant in japanese popular culture. It'd be something I'd be interesting in seeing, though.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Unless they simply ignored the ending of the first series and only did the last two arcs, I just don't see it happening. FoR was huge in Japan and here back in the day. I'm pretty sure a new anime would be a worldwide success, but that would depend on a lot of factors. Heck, I'd even take a 12-13 episode season that only adapts to the end of the Kurei Mansion arc since it would still handily beat the old series. Heck, they could even adapt an arc a year for all I care. All I'm saying is that after Ushio & Tora, Flame of Recca was their second most popular battle series from that era and it would be a shame if it didn't get a similar treatment with a new anime series. Especially since the old one was bad.

Maybe it would also inspire Anzai to try again like the U&T anime seemingly inspired Fujita to start a new shonen. It feels like he hasn't been all too inspired in a long time.

[Markness]

I bought the first twenty volumes of FOR in a bundle on eBay and got the next six at Austin Books & Comics' Sidekick Store (Their entire clearance is its own store) and Right Stuf. I stopped reading after the Ura But? Satsujin arc but I'll pick it back up later. I didn't know Anzai was an assistant to Fujita until around the time I started reading the series and I like how he makes a reference to U&T by showing Fuko holding a volume of the manga. Is that what made you interested in FOR, Spark of Spirit?

[Spark Of Spirit]

I first stumbled across Flame of Recca about eight years ago on a scan site. It was at a time when I was really down on shonen as a whole and where it wasn't in a very good place. I wanted to read a decent shonen, and heard that FoR was a YYH clone (it's not, but that's its stigma) so I started reading it. I didn't even realize until later that it was by the same author of MAR. I don't think you would be able to tell unless someone told you since they're so different. Anyway, I started reading it out of boredom.

What I ended up doing was blowing through the whole series before I knew it. In my mind, FoR epitomizes the best of '90s shonen. There's action, comedy, dramatic stakes, character conflicts and charisma, and a sense of joy that shonen really was missing at the time I read it. I liked that the story really felt like one organic tale that moves from start to finish and doesn't feel artificially lengthened or cut short-- it's exactly as long as it needs to be. To me it's the standard to which I judge shonen. It doesn't do anything wrong, and what it does well it does with aplomb and care. Also, I felt it was a rare manga that got better and better as it went. The beginning of the manga is fun and engaging, but it only goes uphill all the way through the SODOM arc where the climax hits. The ending wraps everything up exceedingly well, too. The series kept my spark for shonen manga alive when it was definitely waning. It's definitely one of my favorite manga series.

When I later learned Anzai (and Makoto Raiku) was a pupil of Fujita, I knew I had to give the Ushio & Tora anime a shot, and it turned out to be one of my favorites. I'm now a fan of Fujita as well. A lot of people called FoR a YYH clone, but other than having a tourny arc (which YYH did not invent) there aren't really any similarities between them. Flame of Recca is clearly influenced by Ushio & Tora and 80s action films more than anything else. It's probably why it dates so well for me. Whenever I hear about people giving it a bad name, it is almost always because of the terrible anime. That's why I started that feature a while back. The manga deserves much better.

The problem with Anzai is that he's a lot like Watsuki. They each did one series which I consider near flawless, then proceeded to stumble on follow-ups. MAR would have been great if he kept to the promise of the beginning and didn't fall into tourney mayhem, and the less said about the mess that was MIXIM the better. I don't know what he's doing now but, like Watsuki, I believe he's capable of so much more. With both Fujita and Raiku recently starting new weekly shonen series (both of which are being received rather well, Fujita's new series is outselling his last by like 3:1) I can't help but feel a little disappointed that he hasn't. But maybe he'll come up with something. Who knows?

So to get to it Flame of Recca has been one of my favorites for a long time. It's in my top 5 manga with Rurouni Kenshin and Monster. It's one of the main reasons I want Ushio & Tora's manga to be licensed so badly. It's why I want it to have a good anime. The series to me is like that one series everyone has: it feels like it was made specifically for me, and that's why it has stuck with me so long.

[Markness]

Spot on post, Spark of Spirit! 

Another mangaka who went down a similar route to Watsuki and Anzai would be Ryu Fujisaki. Houshin Engi is a classic 90's shounen manga but Fujisaki's later works have been lacking compared to it. To be fair, though, his only post-HE work I've read was WaqWaq and scans for his stuff after that tend to never finish.

I am definitely with you on U&T getting officially licensed. I wish Viz would do a survey so we could submit it on there if possible.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Let's try the same thing for Get Backers.

There are several ways to attempt a new Get Backers series. The first is to simply continue from where the old anime left off. Get Backers was built to have filler and filler arcs, so the stuff in season 2 wouldn't affect anything here. This would be the best way to adapt it since it would allow more content to be adapted. The second way is to start from the beginning. I'll try to hash it out here.

The original manga has 12 total "Acts", 10 covered in the first 25 volumes and 2 in the final 14. The ending of the series is hated by pretty much everyone which opens the door to simply ignoring the final two arcs or possibly creating an original ending. No one would probably care if they did either. Long story short, the last two Acts will probably never be animated in any revival of Get Backers.

The original anime covered the first six Acts in the first 25 episodes of season one. Season two had some filler, but also covered Act VII. A follow up anime could simply adapt the remaining three Acts and tack on an original ending. This would require the least amount of effort, and would be the easiest to make. So here's how they could do it. Each Act is three chapters per episode.

Act VIII - 13 episodes
Act IX - 3 episodes
Act X - 18 episodes
Retriever's Second anniversary (final episode?) - 1 episode

Add in some filler episodes and you've got a solid 3 cour, 39 episode show. This would be the best way to do a new anime for Get Backers, though I don't know how likely it would be. But it is the best way to adapt more material.

Now let's try something more difficult. If they started Get Backers from Chapter 1, how long would it have to be?

Well, pretty long. Let's try it again with three chapters an episode.

Act I: Here Come the Get Backers! - 1 episode
Act II: Get Back the Moment! - 2 episodes
Act III: Givers and Takers - 3 episodes
Act IV: Get Back The Sound of Life - 4 episodes
Act V: Phantom Sunflower - 3 episodes
Act VI: Return to Infinity Fortress - 16 episodes
Act VII: The Lost Arms of the Goddess - 8 episodes
Act VIII: Divine Design - 13 episodes
Act IX: Marine Red - 3 episodes
Act X: The Eternal Bond - 18 episodes

That's at least 71 episodes. And that's cutting interludes from the series, of which there are four plus some backstory. It would require a lot of effort to start from scratch, even if you adapted more than three chapters an episode. If you already include the original anime with the last three Acts, this would add up to 88 total episodes of anime. That's pretty good as it is and shows that the old stuff doesn't really need to be redone.

How likely do I think a new Get Backers anime is in this day and age? Well, higher than it was a few years ago. The new revival craze sets it up really well to have a new project. Get Backers was really popular back in the day and the anime lasted 49 episodes which only ended because it caught up to the manga. If there's a candidate for a new anime project for an old property, Get Backers would be a good choice for one. Let's just hope they wouldn't start from scratch.

If you want to know why I didn't include the last two arcs, it is because they would take up this many episodes:

Act XI: Voodoo Child - 8 episodes
Interlude: Rest - 1 episode
Act XII: Get Back the Lost Time - 30 episodes

Yes, it would require 39 episodes on it's own. Throw in the fact that it's widely detested, and you can see why I didn't bother including it. Not going to happen.

Anyway those are just my thoughts.

[Avaitor]

So as of late, I've been getting interested in manga, and have been wanting to build a collection akin to my comics collection. So I've been going through some of the series I've been interested in, and have been wanting to read again, and I want to try to collect these at some point:

Inoue's trilogy of awesome (Slam Dunk being my first priority- I'm not sure if I mentioned this yet, but I read scans for the first 15 or so chapters of it after finishing AnJ, and absolutely loved it)
Tezuka's stuff (Buddha and Astro Boy seem easiest for now, but I'll try to get to what I can as I go along)
Maison Ikkoku
Berserk
20th Century Boys (But I'm mainly waiting for a VizBig edition of the series, ala Monster)
Excel Saga
Dragon Ball

And as you guys may know, I do have all of Monster and A Silent Voice, as well as some Kenshin and am slowly starting to also collect One Piece. I'm pretty behind in the world of manga, so I want to educate myself a little better.

[LumRanmaYasha]

Great choices! 

Excel Saga and Maison Ikkoku will be a little challenging to collect since a lot of their volumes are out of print now. I was pretty fortunate to have been able to get all of ES for as low as I did, since prices for the entire series on eBay now can range from 300-400+ dollars, and I still haven't been able to collect all of MI yet. I really hope Viz will try rereleasing it in an omnibus format sometime now that they're done with the Ranma 1/2 omnibuses.

I'm also holding out on omnibuses for 20th CB, and I'm hoping those will be in the pipes after they finish releasing Master Keaton.

[Avaitor]

I'm finding a lot of MI volumes on Amazon for decent prices. Not all of them, though. But you're right, omnibus/VB edition would be preferred.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Awesome! Those Dragon Ball VizBig editions are the best way to go. Just like with Rurouni Kenshin and all of their other VB releases, they are of the utmost quality, and Toriyama's simple yet highly expressive artwork shines particularly well with the big pages allowing for each panel to have a refreshing sense of space about them and between them. On that end, one major criticism I have for the Astro Boy Omnibi are how small the pages are, which makes the artwork feel far too cluttered in many of the early issues of the series before you get to the late 70's and early 80's era of Astro Boy stories which featured much broader manga panels that Tezuka eventually adopted, more akin to the modern style of manga in general. While I have no doubt that this was done to keep the cost down, I personally wouldn't have minded paying a few dollars extra per omnibi in order to have more comfortably sized pages, but I can't complain too much since I feel lucky that we got this at all. This was clearly a loving treatment of the series by Dark Horse in order to cater to fans of Tezuka in the west, as few as there are. They clearly knew that they couldn't make too much profit if any off of such an old series that's practically obscure in the west to anyone who didn't grow up in the 60's.

As for Takahashi manga in general, I'm noticing that both Inu-Yasha and Ranma 1/2 are very easy and affordable to collect (relatively, for the long-running series that they are), but literally everything else doesn't get much attention from Western publishers and distributors when it comes to her larger body of work.

As for Inoue Takehiko's manga, I never see them in retail book stores, but they are very easy to find online for reasonable prices.

I was also going on a manga and comic book collecting spree myself, a few months ago. I eventually had to stop because I was just spending way too much, and while not technically going past my realm of affordability, I had accumulated so much stuff that I'm still catching up in trying to finish reading what I got.

And then Nioh came out and that's been eating up all of my reading time as of late. There's just too much good stuff out right now.

[Avaitor]

I see Vagabond here and there, but Inoue's stuff isn't as easy to find in retail, yeah. Slam Dunk's another one that I would kind of prefer to wait for a VB edition, but Viz only recently finished releasing it, and while it must have done at least decently to be finished, I don't think sports series are a big enough deal to it to demand a rerelease. At least so soon, but who knows.

Oh yeah, I got a bunch of Manga Vision books from the 90's at a comic book shop last week, for only 50 cents each. I got all of the ones they had that contained chapters of Black Jack in them, and the first of them has the last chapter of Takahashi's Rumic Theater. I'll go through the contents soon, but I'm primarily interested in Black Jack.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Crunchyroll put out a really good article on why MHA is so good.

There are spoilers for season 1 of the show, so be warned.

It's a good take on what is one of the overarching themes of the series, and why I think it makes it one of the best shonen stories to come around in a while. Here's hoping the anime is able to bring more people around. It really has a universal appeal. MHA could easily show Marvel how it's done since they've apparently forgotten.

[gunswordfist]

Happy Birthday, Akira Toriyama.