FLCL the manga is based on the same named GAINAX anime of a boy Naota in a quiet city and his life that turns upside down after a Vespa scooter rider Haruko Haruhara slams him with a guitar. Naota’s head is hit hard and leaving a large growth on his head that spits out mecha from medical equipment manufacture Medical Mechanica. Haruko is from a group called Galaxy Space Police Brotherhood and stays close to Naota for her search in finding a powerful space pirate known as Atomsk. Mega corporation Medical Mechanica is using the robots to capture Atomsk to conquer the galaxy causing a large showdown.

No question in getting this as an owner of the original Tokyopop release of FLCL and the Japanese Kodansha Box versions with silver slip covers and extras. The new omnibus by comic publisher Dark Horse sports almost all of the same colored illustrations found in each Kodansha Box version. Front cover of Naota is a full cover image that is on the back of volume two and the back is an image from the back of volume one’s Kodansha Box cover case. In the back of the omnibus is a left to right short depicting a gun fight with the characters called The Forth Studio. Each page of the short is black with author notes between the white lines of the art and English translations bellow.

My experience with FLCL was back in time when living in foothills of a big city with a small town feel and countless thriving mom-and-pop shops. The city’s shopping mall and attractive main streets were in walking distance. Bookstores would have shelves bursting for more space, myself flipping through manga for finding new reads, and floors covered with people reading.

One amazing aspect of the manga is the freedom the mangaka Hajime Ueda flaunts with abstract artwork. Panels are not always boxes, characters are illustrated for each moment, and artwork is heavily styled without too much complexity. Fans of this book will also enjoy Hajime Ueda’s other two-volume work Q Ko-chan published by Del Rey.

Forums had frequent threads about what Fooly Cooly meant, what the hell they just watched or read, and speculation on what viewers believed were symbolic or metaphors for coming of age themes. Anime and the manga had its criticism for being random and plotless by watchers and readers. Understand my FLCL fascination would require knowing my acceptance of story with little need for explaining fantasy, science, or even plot. Each anime and manga is its own world with its own laws of how technology works and social behavior. Explaining could hinder the experience much like the anime Noein: To Your Other Self episode revealing much of the science in detail to where it obstructs story while being boring and obvious. Not having expectations with story and satisfaction with spending extra time on each page’s art and subtly shows excellence. FLCL is what it is with flawless success and creates fandom discussion that debates itself even today. Its story does not follow the anime close, but remains just as faithful as a traditional adaptation and the differences make it more worth reading if one’s only experience is the anime.

Dark Horse Comics has a preview and Amazon has it for the price of a single volume of manga.

Illustration Source: Pixiv

Shit, part of being an anime fan is assuming that your taste is infallible, and that your opinions are always correct. However, lately I seem to be wrong about most everything. Ore no imouto ga konnani kawaii wake ga nai anime was admittedly better than I surmised; and Kurata Hideyuki did not embarrass himself with the script like with Cloth Road, Read or Die -TV- or TRAIN+TRAIN. iDOLM@STER wasn’t a shitty fanservice anime, but rather a watchable emotion-driven fanservice anime. Black Rock Shooter did not turn out to be the noir-esque anime that I had envisioned, and instead was a bumpy road through preteen adolescence and nonsensical plot twists. Ayako Yoshitani cast as Nazo no Kanojo X’s Urabe Mikoto did not turn out to be the annoying shit-storm I had expected.

And when I’m this wrong, I like to fall back on something absolutely fail-safe.

Medaka Box is the latest anime from Gainax, and is based off a Shounen Jump manga by the same name. The premise is really simple, a well-endowed female rigs the election to become the student council president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer; and passes an edict making the term a “for-life” position. The only way a totalitarian regime like this would be able to sustain itself without resorting to the Big Brother technique, whose poor television ratings should indicate which structure not to follow, is to set up a complaint box for students in need of help to submit their dire requests. Popular media points out that in order for a superhero to increase gross revenue, they need a sidekick; case in point, Batman had Robin, Green Arrow had Speedy, God had Jesus, FDR had Oppenheimer — Medaka needs a random boy from the student body to help where help is not needed. From here it’s like the author stole the template from Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu, since Medaka drags poor what’s-his-face by the throat into becoming her slave and tentative love interest. How this simple concept will turn into a battle manga escapes me, but I guess I’ll have to watch to find out.

By the way, if the lack of pictures haven’t already hinted at it, I have yet to watch the first episode of this series. I’m just rehashing everything from the vague memory of the one-shot I read three years ago. The funny part is, I was saying on mIRC, that shitty fanservice crap like Medaka Box, Kore wa Zombie Desuka, and High School of the Dead would get an anime before SoreMachi ever became popular. It seems I was wrong again.

So why is Medaka Box even becoming animated?

When I first heard Gainax jumped on board, I was wondering what happened to their good taste, and remembered… Gainax has always animated shallow fanservice crap. That isn’t to say that they weren’t well-done, since some of my favorite anime sprout from the fecal waste accompanying Gainax’s abysmal brain farts, but ever since Shikabane Hime I’ve lost most if not all faith with Gainax.

However, who really knows? With Gainax’s skills, they may turn Medaka Box into a decent series; but then I remembered who the original creator of said series is: Nisioisin. Yes, his name is a goddamn palindrome. Now, I hold a lot of respect for Nisioisin, not for his creativity or his writing skills, but essentially because he can output two miles of garbage in any given year. He is like a machine that does nothing but crap out romantic comedies camouflaged in different outfits. All in order to exfoliate a fresh-spin, apparently to disguise the obvious generic axiom of good storytelling: boy meets girl. Together with Go Zappa and Hideyuki Kurata, Nisioisin makes up nearly 54% of the otaku’s holy scriptures. I pulled that percentage from my ass, but you don’t need a mathematician to tell you it’s true.

So now we have Nisioisin and Gainax on board. That’s already a formula for failure. How can we mess this up further? Why not cast Toyosaki Aki as the main character? Let me put it simply, I have never liked this voice actress, and have yet to see an anime where I did not want to stab her character in the face with a pitch fork.

And that is why regardless of how awesome this show turns out to be, I will never ever truly accept it as anything other than shit. This is my fail-safe, because judging anime objectively sucks, and I can’t ever be wrong about my own opinion.