5 Manga I Wish Had Anime Adaptations (one of these is cheating) (Patreon)

So, I really genuinely thought I’d already written this blog at some point, to the point that I had to back through the whole list of published blogs and double check that it wasn’t already there… TWICE. I dunno, maybe I started working on it but got distracted and never finished it, or many I just thought about it so hard that it FELT like I’d written it. Or maybe I just posted this somewhere else and forgot about it. That’d be spectacularly on brand of me.  If the deja vu's real and you actually HAVE heard me say all this before, sorry for wasting everyone's time slightly more than usual! But whatever the case, here it is now, either again or for the first time, in front of your face:

Some people might be surprised to learn that I, despite claiming to draw comics for a living, really don’t read much manga anymore. I generally just stick to anime and get my drawings in motion. Then again, the very fact that I draw my own comics might make this completely UNsurprising, since who wants to spend all day working on something and then take a break by looking at MORE of that thing? Or, less charitably, you may think it’s not surprising that I don’t read much manga since you’ve looked at my comics and think they all suck. I won’t argue with that either. Still, at one point I actually DID read a whole lot of manga, and it’s a bit interesting to me how not ALL of them made the leap to moving pictures. Sometimes I think about the manga industry like it's just the anime industry’s developmental system, the farm league that mainly exists to so that the most successful ones can graduate up to having a show. This is horrendously inaccurate, of course, and reflects the biased perception of folks like me who just don’t pay attention to all the manga that doesn’t NEED to be adapted to other mediums. That said, in a world where it seems like MOST of the stuff I read back in the day totally did get an animated adaptation, it’s still a bit surprising to look back occasionally and realize “Oh yeah, there was never an anime of that.”

In some cases, it’s surprising because it really feels like the manga could have been a successful show, or at least might have ridden on the coat tails of something that WAS successful. In other cases, it’s more a case of me just wanting an anime for my own selfish reasons. And sometimes, there’ll be a manga that actually DID get an anime adaptation, but said adaptation was either so bad or so different that it hardly feels like the same property. In those cases, it still feels like the original manga is still waiting to get an adaptation. At least, that’s what I’m going to say so that I can squeeze one of the entries here onto a list where it otherwise doesn’t belong, because I’m sure never gonna make a whole “5 manga I wish got adapted all over again” list. So let’s talk about some Japanese Mangos!

5. Sand Land

It’s an Akira Toriyama shonen manga. That alone ought to be enough to get a Sand Land anime project funded. What’s more, it’s honestly a pretty good one. That’s “good” in a “disposable Shonen Jump action fluff” kind of way, but that’s an easy thing to get funded, too. Beelzebub is the son of The Devil, and he's basically every overpowered Shonen protagonist, with spiky hair and goggles and the usual trappings. He teams up with cool old dude Rao to dive a tank around a desert wasteland and take down an evil king who’s hogging all the water. Again, super basic stuff, so it’s probably not too surprising that Toriyama only stretched Sand Land out for around three months before wrapping it up. That, and apparently he realized too late that he really doesn’t like drawing tanks.

Still, I’ve seen anime that stretched whole seasons out of LESS of a premise. The grungy “Mad Max by way of Dragon Ball” setting is distinctive, and while Beelzebub isn’t an especially memorable main character… well, once again, that’s never stopped most Shonen Jump adaptations. Probably the biggest strike against Sand Land as it currently exists is the fact that it’s so dang short, and doesn’t really have much of a secondary cast outside of Beelzebub, Rao, and fellow old dude Thief. But the basic “overthrow the evil ruler” premise is so classic that fitting in filler arcs with more characters would be pretty dang easy. I know, I know, openly advocating for large amounts of filler material is a dangerous game, and Dragon Ball fans know that better than anybody. Heck, this very issue will come up again further down the list. However, we’ll ALSO brush up against another property where filler material was a vast improvement, so we know that's not impossible. What matters is, I could TOTALLY see Sand Land being made into a decent action anime, and I think both the grungy post-apocalyptic setting and grungy old man characters would be a nice counter balance to a lot of the current shonen trends. Also, since some animation studio would be the ones creating all the art, Toriyama wouldn’t have to struggle with drawing the tank! Everybody wins!

4. Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro

If Tim Burton drew a comic version of Kino’s Journey, it’d probably feel a lot like Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro. There’s such a mix of cutesy chibi characters and gothy gloom and fantasy whimsy, it feels like this manga just naturally spawned in the run-off of an Artist Alley. Heck, I even saw one or two Kuro cosplayers at cons back in the day, so it was kinda sorta starting to become a thing… and then it wasn’t. The manga was on hiatus for a while so Satoko Kiyuzuki could work on more lucrative stuff like GA: Geijutsuka Art Design Class, which actually DID get an anime, so that can’t have helped.  Whatever the case, even after the manga resumed, I never really heard anybody talk about Kuro anymore.

Still, there’s such a perpetual market for this kind of aesthetic, sweet and cuddly looking but also moody and gloomy, that it genuinely surprises me nobody’s tried to make an anime out of it. I guess I understand why it’s never been a weekly TV show, there may not be THAT many chibi goths out there these days. But I just came back home from an anime con, I can say with certainty that they’re still around to SOME degree. Besides, it doesn’t HAVE to be for TV, a more niche project could be a slam dunk for an OVA series. In fact, that’d probably be for the better, since I’m not sure how well the intricate, squiggly, fantasy art would be served by a TV production schedule. Either way, I just feel like those kids who like their big-headed plushies with a sense of looming tragedy would give their boots and superfluous belt buckles for a Halloween Every Day anime like Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro would be. People still cosplay Soul Eater, after all. A coffin full of bats has GOT to be of comparable worth to a giant talking scythe, right?

3. Q-Ko-chan

Alright, this one’s just for me. Anybody remember the official FLCL manga by Hajime Ueda? That super rough and sketchy manga that only vaguely resembled the FLCL anime and somehow managed to make even less sense? Yeah, that guy made an original manga of his own, and it’s a thousand times weirder. Q-Ko-chan is one of those by-otaku-for-otaku creations that’s filled to bursting with anime tropes and genre deconstructions and SEEMS to have a lot more going on than the reader can actually understand… but also might just be a case of the author throwing stuff in ‘cos it sounds cool. There’s giant mecha suits who look like Powerpuff Girls and high school angst and alien invasion stuff and… I dunno. It’s remarkably hard to tell what’s going on in a lot of Q-Ko-chan, and I don’t just mean that the narrative is to complex to follow. Ueda’s sloppy art can be "an acquired taste” if we’re putting it kindly, and sometimes it’s literally impossible to make out what’s supposed to be on the page. That, and the writing itself is often vague and ambiguous in all the worst ways that Japanese writers mistakenly believe to be tantalizing and mysterious. Even the official translator notes in the Del Rey English version admit to not having any idea what certain lines mean. I say again, this isn't some free scanlation we’re talking about, even the professional, got-paid-for-this real English version of Q-Ko-chan has no idea what Q-Ko-chan means.

..and, perversely, this is a big part of the reason why I wish there was a Q-Ko-chan anime. Us nerds normally complain when a complicated property gets “dumbed down” for consumption by the masses, but this is one case where I think that would really be an improvement. To be blunt, I don’t have all that much faith in Q-Ko-chan being hard to understand because it’s to SMART or anything, I think Hajime Ueda just threw a lot of wacky ideas at the page and let the whole “it’s too deep for you” defense work its magic. But at the same time, I ALSO think that a lot of those ideas really genuinely are cool sounding, not the least of which being those Powerpuff mecha girls. I’d just like to see some footage of those minimalist mecha designs clashing against a more naturalist city backdrop. Also, it seems incredibly likely that a normal, professional anime studio would take all the vague story beats and half-formed concepts in Q-Ko-chan and try to fit them into an actual STORY.  Like, one that actually unfolds in front of the viewer instead of just being vaguely mentioned in passing. It doesn’t bother me that such a story most likely wouldn’t be what Ueda intended because I’m not sure he intended anything other than “Hey, this would be fun to draw!” in the first place.  And besides, Q-Ko-chan is about a series of over a hundred cute mecha girls with outlandish novelty designs.  The merchandising sells itself!

2. Ultra Maniac

Here’s the one where I’m cheating, because Ultra Maniac already HAD an anime adaptation. In fact, the anime is the one I saw first, catching a few episodes at Animazement back when they still showed fansubs on the hotel TVs. Then I went and read the original manga, only to be flabbergasted by how different they were. Like, seriously, Ultra Maniac the anime is virtually a different creation than Ultra Maniac the manga. They start with the same first installment, and then the show veers off into a totally new direction, becoming a magical girl show about finding mystic items and foiling magical opponents and completing a quest and all that jazz. Not that the manga ISN’T about magic (though it’d be amazing if that was entirely an invention of the show) but rather the magical background of protagonist Nina is a means to the end of a very different story about first impressions and misleading appearances, not an adventure about hunting mystical items. I’m not sure if the timeline for this actually works out, but Ultra Maniac the anime LOOKS like it was put unto production the day after the first chapter of Ultra Maniac the manga was drawn. Like, if somebody sent the anime team the character designs and said “Look, you don’t have time to wait for the rest to be written, just make up some crap yourself!” this is the show they would have made.

Seriously, one of the few places the manga and anime reconvene is a rather important plot twist where Nina discovers that main dude Tetsushi isn’t the super nice guy he acts like around others. The manga drops this twist in chapter five. The anime drops it at episode TWENTY. That’s a pretty substantial difference, and effects the narrative of the later a lot more than just making room for more magical girl gimmicks. For one thing, the twist just makes more sense in the manga, since we haven’t seen as much of Tetsushi and can still accept we're learning new stuff about him. After twenty episodes of a show, where the characters been around a LOT, it much more challenging to make this kind of twist not feel totally out of nowhere. More importantly, though, this is actually a DOUBLE twist, since Tetsushi’s also not the bad dude Nina assumes him to be either, because people are more complicated than that, ya know? Well, you wouldn’t know if you only watched the anime, because by that point it had this whole fantasy adventure plot to focus on. That’s why I’d like to see an adaptation of the ORIGINAL manga plot, so that it could finally be done justice in animated form. I mean, the magical girl shenanigans aren’t BAD or anything, but there’s about a hundred shows that have done it much better. Paradoxically, going for a flashier fantasy story made Ultra Maniac much more forgettable than the comparatively grounded school romance story would have been. So let’s give it a second try, huh?

1. K-On! College

Now this one’s a bit weird. Obviously, the original K-On! got a big ol’ anime adaptation and was a huge thing for quite a while. Thus, it’s hardly surprising that creator Kakifly has made multiple attempts to milk that cash cow for all it’s worth. In an impressive show of ambition, there were actually TWO direct sequels to K-On! running simultaneously in different magazines, K-On! Highschool and K-On! College. As the names suggest, K-On! Highschool sticks with Sakuragaoka High School and focuses on Azusa’s attempts to keep the Light Music Club going after the rest of the crew graduates, while K-On! College follows the said graduated members as they move on to university. And here’s the weird bit: of the two, I absolutely think High School is the better manga. It continues the story of the remaining characters, actually growing them in new ways and doing some different things with them. Even ONE of the new characters provides a unique new addition to the formula, with the non-musical Nao appointed as the new band’s producer (the OTHER new character is Mugi’s previously unmentioned maid Sumire, who is… less original). College, of the other hand, is basically just the original K-On! all over again, except now the girls all live in a dorm.  There's way less substance, and the overwhelming sense of familiarity makes it feel pretty boring. So why would I specifically single out THAT manga for an anime adaptation?

Well, there’s two things. For one, if we’re all being honest with each other, the original K-On! manga isn’t really all that good either. It was only when the anime adaptation added stuff, ESPECIALLY in season two, that any of the cast went from being moe delivery services to actually becoming CHARACTERS. Even more than that, though, is the music. It should go without saying that any story about a rock band is better suited to a medium WITH sound than without it, so any incarnation of K-On! that’s exclusively manga-based will be at a disadvantage. And what's more, K-On! has REALLY DANG GOOD music, so of course I’d want an excuse to see some more created for the franchise. And that’s the thing. The ONE really clever idea that K-On! College has going for it is changing the club dynamic. When the girls discover that the university also has a Light Music Club, they of course all decide to join. But where part of the gimmick of the original was the fact that the entire club had graduated the previous year, so the new girls could have free reign of the place, that obviously wouldn’t be the case for the grown up college club. There’s plenty of preexisting members and an established leadership structure already in place before our protagonists ever show up. In fact, a SECOND fully intact band joins at the same time as our girls. To deal with all these people, and keep anyone from feeling left out, the club establishes a schedule by which different arrangements of girls will jam together at different days, allowing for the maximum amount of interaction and cross-pollination… and then the manga IMMEDIATELY forgets all about both that idea and club stuff entirely, instead focusing on an unbroken chain of generic “cute girls doing cute things” gags. Yeah, I know, K-On! always kind of treated the band stuff as a means to an end for cutesy stuff, but the anime struck enough of a balance between the two that seeing the new manga revert back is disappointing.  And besides, the OTHER manga running at the same time was able to be about band stuff just fine, so why not THIS one?  Thus, my first though is "Well, just let the anime filler save it again!"

Now, obviously, just because ONE anime adaptation happened to produce some atypically good filler doesn’t mean that ANY animated version of K-On! would. In general, the odds are still against it being any good. But I also kinda don’t care, because ultimately I just want to hear more K-On! music, and the whole “rotating jam schedule” idea would be a fantastic way to achieve that. Think about it, they already released multiple Hokago Tea Time singles, solo singles for every character, and even that one single by Sawako’s old band. Why not REALLY crank the merchandising machine into overdrive and commission new songs for each and every potential jamming combination? They wouldn’t even necessarily have to write THAT many new songs every single time, they could also record different arrangements of the same couple of tunes depending on who’s supposed to be playing on that version. I mean, all those character singles each had their own versions of one common song, why not do that only change more than the vocalist? And while we're at it, why not record a mini album by OnNaGumi (the other group in the club), then record HTT “covering” those songs, and OnNaGumi doing versions of THEIR songs? The potential for variation and gimmicky twists is limitless! So yes, I’m seriously suggesting that an entire television be produced just as an excuse to create a soundtrack. Look, I grew up watching The Monkees. This seems totally reasonable to me.

...and I'm sure these are far from the only manga I've read that would do well with an anime adaptation they never got, but they're the ones I most remember.  Of course, if I can't remember reading the manga in the first place, then it's probably not good enough to justify an anime at all, is it?