May is Manga Month at Dark Horse and we're celebrating with giveaways of our newest manga titles every Monday in May! This week, we're celebrating the release of Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Shinji Ikari Raising Project Omnibus Book 3! In Book Three, Shinji, Rei, and Asuka at last begin to train as a team for real combat, weapons in hand . . . stalking a giant gelatinous creature with a spherical “core” they must take out. If this kind of mission sounds strangely familiar, you’re right—but if things go as usual, it’s poor Shinji who’ll get called the slimeball! We love the Shinji Ikari Raising Project and think you will to, so we want to give you a chance to win all three...
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The fourth and final (?) Evangelion Rebuild movie is still somewhere on the horizon…but the longest-running Evangelion manga is in your stores right now, as Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Shinji Ikari Raising Project vol. 17 hits the stands! Often, in manga, when a school puts on a play, it’s a shameless ploy to try to get the female and male leads to kiss. But of course, Shinji rarely even gets to show up on the cover of his own manga, so as you might expect, Class 2-A’s production of Romeo and Juliet is a shameless ploy to get Asuka and Rei to kiss. Can rivals who aren’t exactly good friends put on a convincing performance as two of the greatest lovers in dramatic history? Or has their rivalry been...
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The longest-running Evangelion manga returns with vol. 16 of The Shinji Ikari Raising Project, in stores this week! Even the original Neon Genesis Evangelion manga by series co-creator and character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto only ran for 14 volumes, and as someone who’s been a fan of Evangelion since it first came out, I’m always intrigued to note the longevity of The Shinji Ikari Raising Project—especially as the series is inspired by a single scene in the original TV version of the anime’s final episode, where, as part of the Instrumentality (and, perhaps, as part of the meta-nature of that episode, which makes nods to the fact the show is a performance with a script and stage) the characters see a vision of...
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[please insert image Shinji Ikari 15.jpg here] In the most recent Neon Genesis Evangelion movie, Evangelion 3:0—You Can (Not) Redo, Rei Ayanami is a character who no longer seems so much a clone as a copy—I mean, a photocopy, the kind you get after you make one copy, then put it down on the glass to make a copy of that copy, and then repeat the process, copying each copy until what you started with hardly seems there any more. Rei was never exactly the type to whoop it up, but she used to be the iconic female character of Evangelion, a role that has been largely transferred to Asuka (the one with the eyepatch) and Mari (the one with the glasses). I apologize, by the way, for the spoiler about Rei being a clone, but that was...
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It seemed natural that a yankii would be into Asuka. I don’t mean a yanqui or a yankee—a fan from the U.S. of A. This fan was a yankii from Japan, a biker like Ichigo in Kamikaze Girls. Shock of bleached-blond hair, red satin jacket with a Rising Sun patch, black lipstick, stiletto boots, the whole nine. And she was purchasing a ¼ scale Asuka Langley Soryu figurine in Nakano Broadway, the legendary fan shopping mall in Tokyo, portrayed in The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service as “a five-story ant farm for otaku.” Kurosagi’s creator Eiji Otsuka, who’s coming to Anime Expo this 4th of July weekend, no doubt knows Nakano Broadway better than I do, living in town and all. But as an otaku...
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