my future holds infinite possibilities
neon genesis evangelion: the manga (yoshiyuki sadamoto, 1994–2013)
My main interest going into the Evangelion manga was what the material would look like in the hands of somebody telling a parallel, but independent, story. And the “somebody” in this instance, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, is also not a random guy, but somebody pretty involved with the creation of the show.1 I’m not sure how many other cases of a parallel work being created at the same time exist in this way, where what you’re looking at is not quite a “novelization of” (or “manga-ization of”) the original but something written alongside it. I guess The Third Man is kind of like this. However, the Evangelion manga is also a serialized work and it ran for quite a while after the show ended (and started a little before it), so… it’s still a bit different!
But as a work, standing on its own—I didn’t have that much interest in it.
A habit I fall into often, and find hard to shake, is talking about collaborative works like Evangelion as if they are novels—that is, as if …