Neon Genesis Evangelion is famous for being, among other things, a gigantic multimedia licensing phenomenon, whose products include everything from the most humble thinpak DVD to a night in an Evangelion-themed hotel room with a view of Mt. Fuji (how much more Japanese can you get than that?). But look upon this pile, grown vast in space and time, and ponder: the very first thing you could ever buy from Evangelion was a manga, the original version of which premiered in the December 1994 issue of Kadokawa's Shonen Ace magazine. As that issue actually hit the racks in November, it came out nearly eleven months before the premiere of the Evangelion anime itself on Japan's TV Tokyo network, October 4, 1995.Today, Shonen Ace is host to another Evangelion manga, one of two published by Dark Horse: Neon Genesis Evangelion—The Shinji Ikari Raising Project, written and drawn by Osamu Takahashi. It's proven to be one of the most popular interpretations of the series; The Shinji Ikari Raising Project began running in the magazine in June of 2005, and so far has been collected in eleven graphic novels in Japan, of which so far eight have been released from Dark Horse.
At first its popularity might seem a little strange, because the Neon Genesis Evangelion anime has a well-earned reputation for being dark and cryptic, and that's not the tone of the Shinji Ikari manga at all. But Evangelion fans (including me) have always been able to appreciate the series for its different sides, and one of these is definitely relationship comedy. When the series first aired in the mid-'90s, the Eva characters became icons in short order—of the sort where many Japanese people, even if they've never actually seen Evangelion, at least recognize Rei and Asuka. Fans liked to see them with a cheerful face, which is why that's just what you see on nearly every Evangelion figurine (compare to the determined expressions you're likely to see on Star Wars or Lord of the Rings figurines, even though in the series Rei and Asuka are combat pilots). And they wanted to see them having a happy life, perhaps exactly because of the disturbing fate they (and everybody else) faced in the anime. Perhaps that's why The Shinji Ikari Raising Project is more about the moments when it's the fate of a baseball game at stake, not that of humanity.
And Shinji Ikari didn't conjure this change of mood out of nothing—even in the Evangelion anime, after all, things could become different in a hurry when it's a co-ed occasion. Think about the difference in mood between Shinji's pilot training in Episode 3, where he emotionlessly practices firing at the enemy again and again in a simulator, and Shinji and Asuka's pilot training together in Episode 9, where they wear dance leotards and play Twister in Misato's apartment. And this split personality hasn't really changed in the new Evangelion films; watching Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance, I was struck by the things that wouldn't have seemed out of place in the Shinji Ikari manga—Rei and Asuka trying to learn how to cook, Mari's first encounter with Shinji, and Asuka's new plug suit...
Swing by the blog next week for Part Two of Carl Horn's blog post!